Dermot McCarthy Libri

Roddy Doyle's work offers a fresh perspective on working-class Dublin, challenging traditional literary portrayals of Irish identity. His novels combine realism, humor, and social satire, focusing on the individual's quest for dignity amid societal upheaval. This analysis highlights how Doyle's narratives reflect the significant changes in modern Ireland, asserting his place as a key figure in 1990s literature despite critical resistance to his accessibility. Through his storytelling, Doyle amplifies voices often overlooked in the broader cultural discourse.

In 2005, when John McGahern published his Memoir, he revealed for the first time in explicit detail the specific nature of the autobiographical dimension of his fiction, a dimension he had hitherto either denied or mystified. Taking Memoir as a paradigmatic work of memory, confession, and imaginative recovery, this book is a close reading of McGahern’s novels that discovers his narrative poiēsis in both the fiction and the memoir to be a single, continuous, and coherent mythopoeic project concealed within the career of a novelist writing ostensibly in the realist tradition of modern Irish fiction. McGahern’s total body of work centres around the experiences of loss, memory, and imaginative recovery. To read his fiction as an art of memory is to recognize how he used story-telling to confront the extended grief and anger that blighted his early life and that shaped his sense of self and world. It is also to understand how he gradually, painfully and honestly wrote his way out of the darkness and despair of the early work into the luminous celebration of life and the world in his great last novel That They May Face the Rising Sun.