Derek Hand's A History of the Irish Novel is a major work of criticism on some of the greate... more Derek Hand's A History of the Irish Novel is a major work of criticism on some of the greatest and most globally recognisable writers of the novel form. Writers such as Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett and John McGahern have demonstrated the extraordinary intellectual range, thematic complexity and stylistic innovation of Irish fiction. Derek Hand provides a remarkably detailed picture of the Irish novel's emergence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He shows the story of the genre is the story of ...
This chapter examines novelistic responses to the multifaceted changes that characterized life in... more This chapter examines novelistic responses to the multifaceted changes that characterized life in Dublin during and after the Celtic Tiger era. The first part explores portrayals of changing personal, moral, and artistic value systems at a time when the forces of globalization were altering the city’s distinctive culture. This is followed by a consideration of the treatment of history in some recent Dublin-set novels, with particular focus on works that explore the interplay between previous eras and the present one, including the legacies of hidden trauma. In examining novelists’ attempts to identify what it is that defines Dubliners and their city in the era of globalization, the chapter finds that while the answers vary from novelist to novelist, all understand the city’s identity to be fluid and mobile, a complex amalgam of local and global elements that poses unsettling questions about the meaning and constitution of self and community.
very bad imitations. I threw them all away, but I remember one opening line especially:" The... more very bad imitations. I threw them all away, but I remember one opening line especially:" The white May blossoms swooned into the open mouth of the grave" 6 [laughter]. Well I suppose we all begin by imitation. Before that I had only read detective stories and PG Wodehouse and the like, and here suddenly was something that was new to me, something about real life, as I was experiencing it myself, I thought it was something to emulate. So I began to write and my Aunt Sadie down the road had a huge black Remington typewriter and I ...
Derek Hand's A History of the Irish Novel is a major work of criticism on some of the greate... more Derek Hand's A History of the Irish Novel is a major work of criticism on some of the greatest and most globally recognisable writers of the novel form. Writers such as Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett and John McGahern have demonstrated the extraordinary intellectual range, thematic complexity and stylistic innovation of Irish fiction. Derek Hand provides a remarkably detailed picture of the Irish novel's emergence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He shows the story of the genre is the story of ...
This chapter examines novelistic responses to the multifaceted changes that characterized life in... more This chapter examines novelistic responses to the multifaceted changes that characterized life in Dublin during and after the Celtic Tiger era. The first part explores portrayals of changing personal, moral, and artistic value systems at a time when the forces of globalization were altering the city’s distinctive culture. This is followed by a consideration of the treatment of history in some recent Dublin-set novels, with particular focus on works that explore the interplay between previous eras and the present one, including the legacies of hidden trauma. In examining novelists’ attempts to identify what it is that defines Dubliners and their city in the era of globalization, the chapter finds that while the answers vary from novelist to novelist, all understand the city’s identity to be fluid and mobile, a complex amalgam of local and global elements that poses unsettling questions about the meaning and constitution of self and community.
very bad imitations. I threw them all away, but I remember one opening line especially:" The... more very bad imitations. I threw them all away, but I remember one opening line especially:" The white May blossoms swooned into the open mouth of the grave" 6 [laughter]. Well I suppose we all begin by imitation. Before that I had only read detective stories and PG Wodehouse and the like, and here suddenly was something that was new to me, something about real life, as I was experiencing it myself, I thought it was something to emulate. So I began to write and my Aunt Sadie down the road had a huge black Remington typewriter and I ...
This chapter argues that the novel form is best suited to giving expression to the multifaceted I... more This chapter argues that the novel form is best suited to giving expression to the multifaceted Irish reality. Ireland, in the modern moment, is a place of incongruity and contradiction: it is at once a site of colonization and post-colonization, as well as simultaneously positioning itself as an integral part of a modern, globalized, economic union. The novel’s being bound to the immediate moment, while also aspiring toward the transcendence of immutable art, perfectly reflects an Irish mood caught between the violent actuality of war and a desire for mundane ordinariness. Indeed, it can be argued that the novel form offers a very human, and humane, lens through which to expose the hidden histories and anxieties of real people. Certainly the Irish novel has consistently done this from the seventeenth century onward, as it has charted the story of Ireland’s complex emergence into modernity.
Derek Hand's A History of the Irish Novel is a major work of criticism on some of the greate... more Derek Hand's A History of the Irish Novel is a major work of criticism on some of the greatest and most globally recognisable writers of the novel form. Writers such as Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett and John McGahern have demonstrated the extraordinary intellectual range, thematic complexity and stylistic innovation of Irish fiction. Derek Hand provides a remarkably detailed picture of the Irish novel's emergence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He shows the story of the genre is the story of ...
Uploads
Books by Derek Hand
Papers by Derek Hand