Wallace Stevens and the Contemporary Irish Novel is a major contribution to the study of the literary influence of the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens. Stevens’s lifelong poetic quest for order and the championing of the creative affordances of the imagination finds compelling articulation in the positioning of the Irish novel as a response to larger legacies of Anglo-American modernism, and how aesthetic re-imagining can be possible in the aftermath of the destruction of certainties and literary tradition heralded by postmodern practice and metatextual consciousness. It is this book’s argument that intertextual influences flowing from Stevens’s poetry towards the vitality of the novelistic imagination enact robust dialectical exchanges between existential chaos and artistic order, contemporary form and poetic precursors. Through readings of novels by important contemporary Irish novelists John Banville, Colum McCann, Ed O’Loughlin, Iris Murdoch, and Emma Donoghue, this book contemporizes Stevens’s literary influence with refence to novelistic style, themes, and thematic preoccupations that stake the claim for the international status of the contemporary Irish novel as it shapes a new understanding of “world literature” as exchange between national languages, cultures, and alternative formulations of aesthetic modernity as continuing project.

Collected Poetry and Prose.

Daniel R. Schwarz has studied and taught the modern British novel for decades and now brings his impressive erudition and critical acuity to this insightful study of the major authors and novels of the first half of the twentieth century. An insightful study of British fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. Draws on the author’s decades of experience researching and teaching the modern British novel. Sets the modern British novel in its intellectual, cultural and literary contexts. Features close readings of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow, Joyce’s Dubliners and Ulysses, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse and Forster’s A Passage to India. Shows how these novels are essential components in a modernist cultural tradition which includes the visual arts. Takes account of recent developments in theory and cultural studies. Written in an engaging style, avoiding jargon.

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), one of the leading poets of the twentieth century, continues to influence a wide range of poets writing today. However, an image persists of Stevens as an aesthete who was politically removed from his times and who also exhibited sexist and racist tendencies. Jacqueline Vaught Brogan offers careful readings from across the Stevens canon to demonstrate that, contrary to such enduring earlier assessments, Stevens's work over the years shows poetic and political changes that merge with his growing ethical concerns. Brogan traces Stevens's evolving poetic practices along three major lines that often intersected. She situates the beginnings of Stevens's development within his early resistance to the pressures of "reality" on the imagination, an artistic stand that pitted him against the "objective" poetry exemplified in the work of William Carlos Williams. Then, in the midst of Stevens's career, World War II moved him forward with new poetic responsibilities both to witness the current world and to guide readers into their future. The emergence of an almost feminist vision defines Stevens's third line of development. Finally, in addition to identifying these developmental stages, Brogan addresses the undercurrent of race throughout Stevens's work. According to Brogan, Stevens not only changed but matured over time. What began as an aesthetic "violence within," or a girding against such "violence without" as social unrest and war, rapidly evolved during Stevens's middle years into a set of perceptions and practices increasingly responsive to his times.

Awake in America seeks to establish a conversation between Irish and Irish American literature that challenges many of the long-accepted boundaries between the two.

The novel is modernism's most vital and experimental genre. With a chronology and guide to further reading, this 2007 Companion is an accessible and informative overview of the genre.

An exploration of the modern European novel from a renowned English literature scholar Reading the Modern European Novel since 1900 is an engaging, in-depth examination of the evolution of the modern European novel. Written in Daniel R. Schwarz's precise and highly readable style, this critical study offers compelling discussions on a wide range of major works since 1900 and examines recurring themes within the context of significant historical events, including both World Wars and the Holocaust. The author cites important developments in the evolution of the modern novel and explores how these paradigmatic works of fiction reflect intellectual and cultural history, including developments in painting and cinema. Schwarz focuses on narrative complexity, thematic subtlety, and formal originality as well as how novels render historical events and cultural developments Discussing major works by Proust, Camus, Mann, Kafka, Grass, di Lampedusa, Bassani, Kertesz, Pamuk, Kundera, Saramago, Muller and Ferrante, Schwarz explores how these often experimental masterworks pay homage to the their major predecessors—discussed in Schwarz's ground-breaking Reading the European Novel to 1900—even while proposing radical departures from realism in their approach to time and space, their testing the limits of language, and their innovative ways of rendering the human psyche. Written for teachers and students by a highly-acclaimed scholar and including valuable study questions, Reading the Modern European Novel since 1900 offers a guide for a deeper understanding of how these original modern masters respond to both the past and present.