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Extremes

Seamus Deane, 7 February 1985

Children of the Dead End: The Rat-Pit 
by Patrick MacGill.
Caliban, 305 pp., £10, September 1983, 0 904573 36 2
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The Red Horizon The Great Push: An Episode of the Great War 
by Patrick MacGill.
Caliban, 306 pp., £9, October 1984, 0 904573 90 7
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The Navy Poet: The Collected Poetry of Patrick MacGill 
Caliban, 407 pp., £12, October 1984, 0 904573 99 0Show More
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... In 1914 Patrick MacGill’s first novel, Children of the Dead End, sold ten thousand copies in a fortnight. In the same year, Joyce’s Dubliners sold 499 copies, 120 of them bought by the author. In 1915, MacGill published a companion novel, The Rat-Pit, which was also highly successful and contained a Preface in which the author avowed himself to be ‘highly gratified’ by the success attained by Children of the Dead End ‘in Britain and abroad ...

Quashed Quotatoes

Michael Wood: Finnegans Wake, 16 December 2010

Finnegans Wake 
by James Joyce, edited by Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon.
Houyhnhnm, 493 pp., £250, March 2010, 978 0 9547710 1 0
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Joyce’s Disciples Disciplined 
edited by Tim Conley.
University College Dublin, 185 pp., £42.50, May 2010, 978 1 906359 46 1
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... Lewis Carroll seems an obvious precursor of James Joyce in the world of elaborate wordplay, and critics have long thought so. Harry Levin suggested in 1941 that Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty was ‘the official guide’ to the vocabulary of Finnegans Wake. Why wouldn’t he be? He was the inventor of the portmanteau word (‘You see it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word’), an inspired parodist of what Saussure later called the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign (that is, its being grounded in nothing but convention) and extremely proud of his ability to ‘explain all the poems that ever were invented – and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet ...

By an Unknown Writer

Patrick Parrinder, 25 January 1996

Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories 
by Italo Calvino, translated by Tim Parks.
Cape, 276 pp., £15.99, November 1995, 0 224 03732 3
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... lay down petroleum deposits – ‘on whose behalf,’ Calvino adds, ‘we do not know.’ James Joyce began his career as a social historian of ‘scrupulous meanness’, and ended up with Finnegans Wake, which is both an avatar of the Arabian Nights and a vast, impossibly prolix history of the world. Calvino, too, broadens out, his later work offering ...

Irishness is for other people

Terry Eagleton: Enrique Vila-Matas, 19 July 2012

Dublinesque 
by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated by Anne McLean and Rosalind Harvey.
Harvill Secker, 245 pp., £16.99, June 2012, 978 1 84655 489 6
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... new novel centres on Bloomsday, the annual celebration in Dublin of the day on which Joyce’s Ulysses is set. Many nations celebrate mythical events, but Ireland commemorates a fictional one. It is as if Britain were to dedicate a feast day to Falstaff or to the Artful Dodger. For some in Ireland, Bloomsday is a useful alternative to ...

Grumbles

C.K. Stead, 15 October 1981

Flaws in the Glass: A Self-Portrait 
by Patrick White.
Cape, 272 pp., £7.95, October 1981, 9780224029247
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... judgment and the judgment abroad arises frequently in post-colonial literatures, and the case of Patrick White illustrates its complexities. First, how ‘Australian’ is White? He was born in London but of parents who were both Australians of grazier stock. He returned to Australia during his first year of life and lived in Sydney until the age of 13. So ...

Manly Scowls

Patrick Parrinder, 6 February 1986

An Artist of the Floating World 
by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Faber, 206 pp., £9.95, February 1986, 0 571 13608 7
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Revolutionary Road 
by Richard Yates.
Methuen, 337 pp., £4.50, January 1986, 0 413 59720 2
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Young Hearts Crying 
by Richard Yates.
Methuen, 347 pp., £9.95, January 1986, 9780413597304
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Ellen 
by Ita Daly.
Cape, 144 pp., £8.95, January 1986, 0 224 02833 2
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... time-warp, in the linear narrative tradition of American naturalism. His title is taken from James Joyce (of all people), but the 40-year time-span and bifurcated narrative of his new novel are more reminiscent of Arnold Bennett. Yates’s story, which could have split neatly into three volumes, divides at the point where Michael and Lucy Davenport, after ...

Sacred Peter

Norman MacCaig, 19 June 1980

Sacred Keeper 
by Peter Kavanagh.
Goldsmith Press, 403 pp., £4.40, May 1979, 0 904984 48 6
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Dead as Doornails 
by Anthony Cronin.
Poolbeg Press, 201 pp., £1.75, May 1980, 9780905169316
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The Macmillan Dictionary of Irish Literature 
edited by Robert Hogan.
Macmillan, 815 pp., £2, February 1980, 0 333 27085 1
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... the poet’s brother, starts straight off, sentence one, by announcing: ‘When I write about Patrick Kavanagh I write as a partisan, as his alter ego, almost as his evangelist.’ And if you think that’s a dubious basis for a biography, what about this? As far as possible I shall avoid writing of him as a brother since my interest in him was mainly as ...

Flying the flag

Patrick Parrinder, 18 November 1993

The Modern British Novel 
by Malcolm Bradbury.
Secker, 512 pp., £20, October 1993, 0 436 20132 1
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After the War: The Novel and English Society since 1945 
by D.J. Taylor.
Chatto, 310 pp., £17.99, September 1993, 9780701137694
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... Trinidadian novelist’. This might place him with such non-British writers as Nadine Gordimer and Patrick White, but he is later included in Bradbury’s alphabetical checklist of British novelists since 1876. It looks as if an adverse judgment has been passed by default. It is not that Bradbury shies away from evaluative criticism: the book is full of ...

Thirty Years Ago

Patrick Parrinder, 18 July 1985

Still Life 
by A.S. Byatt.
Chatto, 358 pp., £9.95, June 1985, 0 7011 2667 1
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Wales’ Work 
by Robert Walshe.
Secker, 279 pp., £8.95, July 1985, 9780436561450
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... displays an infectious narrative style which ranges from Old Testament pastiche to bits of sub-Joyce interior monologue. Beneath the Gothic fantasy and the reflections of a real world of office flirtations, boardroom battles and editorial vendettas, what holds this strange pot-pourri together is the author’s obsessive, pedantic wit. The narrative is ...

Ireland at Swim

Denis Donoghue, 21 April 1983

The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies, 1977-1981 
edited by M.P. Hederman and R. Kearney, with a preface by Seamus Heaney.
Blackwater Press/Colin Smythe, 930 pp., £25, October 1982, 9780905471136
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A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers 
by Hugh Kenner.
Knopf, 352 pp., $16.95, April 1983, 0 394 42225 2
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... Ireland, and the Irish Language and Culture. I should report that the magazine, after an issue on Joyce and the Arts in Ireland, has now gone international with a Latin American issue and one on Socialism and Culture. The editors of the Bag are university teachers, gifted in literature and philosophy, and, it seems, determined to let these commitments take ...

Diary

Francis Wyndham: At the Theatre, 10 November 1988

... adumbrated a mystery central to drama: who is being watched, and by whom? Went to a matinee of Re:Joyce!, Maureen Lipman’s brilliant impersonation of Joyce Grenfell at the Fortune Theatre. An odd experience. Grenfell, whose solo performances were based on the accurate re-creation of closely observed social mannerisms, is ...

Playboys of the GPO

Colm Tóibín, 18 April 1996

Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation 
by Declan Kiberd.
Cape, 719 pp., £20, November 1995, 0 224 04197 5
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... Catalan while the rest of Spain was Moorish. And the attempt, too, by Yeats and Synge, and indeed Joyce, to embrace modernity and Europe as a way of keeping England at bay was close to Domènech’s use of iron and steel and modern systems while Spain slept. There were echoes, too, between the careers of Joyce and ...

Funny Old Fame

Patrick Parrinder, 10 January 1991

Things: A Story of the Sixties, 
by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos and Andrew Leak.
Collins Harvill, 221 pp., £12.50, July 1990, 0 00 271038 2
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Parcours Peree 
edited by Mireille Ribière.
Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 162 pp., frs 125, July 1990, 2 7297 0365 9
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Women 
by Philippe Sollers, translated by Barbara Bray.
Columbia, 559 pp., $24.95, December 1990, 0 231 06546 9
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... blather?’ he asks early on. S., too, we are told, is not only a self-proclaimed successor of Joyce but a sexist and a pretentious creep. Later the reader is accused of boredom, voyeurism (‘And what about the screwing?’ we are supposed to be asking, as if there were not already enough of it) and ‘systematic hostility’. Should one plead ...

Do, Not, Love, Make, Beds

David Wheatley: Irish literary magazines, 3 June 2004

Irish Literary Magazines: An Outline History and Descriptive Bibliography 
Irish Academic, 318 pp., £35, January 2003, 0 7165 2751 0Show More
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... College Dublin, was rejecting ‘The Day of the Rabblement’ by a young troublemaker called James Joyce. He wasn’t turned down by everyone: his description of the Irish Homestead as ‘the pigs’ paper’ may have been a way of covering his blushes – early versions of three Dubliners stories appeared there, one of them under the pseudonym ‘Stephen ...

The Great Copyright Disaster

John Sutherland, 12 January 1995

Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright 
by Mark Rose.
Harvard, 176 pp., £21.95, October 1993, 0 674 05308 7
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Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation 
by Susan Stewart.
Duke, 353 pp., £15.95, November 1994, 0 8223 1545 9
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The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature 
edited by Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi.
Duke, 562 pp., £42.75, January 1994, 0 8223 1412 6
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... had proved so golden for them over the years. The same inertia is evident with the works of Woolf, Joyce, Hardy and Yeats. With much hoo-hah the world was informed in the late Eighties that the text of Ulysses was a disgrace, and a new perfected text would be introduced to coincide with the termination of copyright (this was the ill-fated Gabler ...

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