Bernard MacLaverty

Richard Rankin Russell

2009
175 pages
$34.95
ISBN 9781611483017
Contemporary Irish Writers

This first monograph in English on the Northern Irish-born writer Bernard MacLaverty discusses his fiction in its aesthetic, cultural, and political contexts. Richard Rankin Russell emphasizes MacLaverty's dialectic of imprisonment versus freedom, the latter of which is represented by love. Love in the earlier works is often perverted, whether in the name of family or Irish nationalism, but after the publication of the novel Cal (1983), manifestations of love become more positive and characters attain the potential to escape various forms of imprisonment. Russell identifies three distinct phases of MacLaverty's career: the visual, the sonic, and a blending of the two. He concludes by showing how MacLaverty's style, humor, and values enable his deeply humane fiction to model human community. Attentive to language and theoretically well informed, each chapter of this enterprising book discusses a particular short story collection or novel and also explores the salient features of MacLaverty's fiction in general.

Order here

Reviews

"Russell's monograph is a marvelous beginning for the Bucknell series, and will be the starting point for every future scholar of the author's work. Bernard MacLaverty is a lucid, discerning, and accomplished book."--Richard Haslam, Léirmheasanna

"This full-length study of a very popular and well-regarded Irish writer is lively, comprehensive, and critically acute: it is an admirable account of MacLaverty's art." - George Watson, professor of Irish literature, University of Aberdeen

About the author:

Richard R. Russell is Associate Professor of English at Baylor University.

Distributed by Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group