Touchstones: John Mcgahern's Classical Style

Abstract

Touchstones examines the ways in which John McGahern became a writer through reading. This reading was both extensive and intensive, and tended towards immersion in the classics. New insights are provided into McGahern’s use of writers as diverse as Dante Alighieri, William Blake, Stendhal, Albert Camus, W. B. Yeats and several others. Evidence for these claims is found both through close reading of McGahern’s published texts as well as via unprecedented sleuthing in his extensive archive of papers held at the National University of Ireland, Galway. The ultimate intention of this book is to draw attention to the very literary and writerly nature of McGahern as an artist, and to place him, not just as a great Irish writer, but as part of a long and venerable European tradition.