This newly updated and expanded paperback edition of the first monograph in English on Northern Ireland-born Bernard MacLaverty discusses his fiction in its aesthetic, cultural, religious, and political contexts. Richard Rankin Russell emphasizes MacLaverty’s dialectic of imprisonment versus freedom, the latter represented by love. Love in the earlier fiction is often perverted, whether in the name of family or Irish nationalism, but after the publication of the novel Cal (1983), its manifestations become more positive and characters are able 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, and 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 analyzes a particular short story collection or novel, and also explores the salient features of MacLaverty’s fiction generally.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Appearance Versus Reality in Secrets and Other Stories
2. True and Distorted Fatherly Loves in Lamb
3. Seasonal Communication in A Time to Dance and Other Stories
4. Perception, Confession, and Community in Cal
5. Hearing the Other: Sounds of Connection and Community in The Great Profundo and Other Stories
6. Ontological Encounters with Others in Walking the Dog and Other Stories
7. The Beauties of Grace Notes
8. The Buoyant Beauty of a Belfast Bildungsroman: The Anatomy School
9. The Truth of Fiction: Matters of Life and Death and Other Stories
10. “All Shall Be Well”: Midwinter Break
11. Rescue and Resurrection Narratives: Blank Pages and Other Stories
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index