Please find details below for two new publications by EFACIS members on the subject of John Banville, John Banville by Neil Murphy and Reading John Banville Through Jean Baudrillard by Hedda Friberg-Harnesk:
Reading John Banville
Through Jean Baudrillard
by Hedda Friberg-Harnesk
Praise for the Book
“There is a wealth of knowledge in this sensitive reading of John Banville’s work. Hedda Friberg-Harnesk uses the theories of Jean Baudrillard as a springboard into the myriad realms of Banville’s fiction, showing how his characters anxiously move between memory and imagination, between the achingly real and the self-consciously imagined. This reading of John Banville’s oeuvre in the light of Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra opens up a fascinating critical engagement with the work, illuminating his literary concerns and adding to our understanding of his art as a whole.”
—Professor Derek Hand, Head of the School of English, Dublin City University
"This perceptive study considers Banville’s major works of the last two decades—that 'shrouded fictional territory'—in the light of Jean Baudrillard’s theory of the inescapability of simulation and simulacra. Pinpointing the compelling sense of radical uncertainty throughout Banville’s supremely stylish and dark novels which increasingly seem to circle round a core of emptiness, Hedda Friberg-Harnesk applies Baudrillard’s arresting ideas to examine Banville’s various and progressive dissolutions of self and world in modernity with both penetration and eloquence. This book throws a fascinating new light on a wide range of Banville’s recurring motifs and preoccupations."
—Patricia Coughlan, Professor Emerita, School of English, University College, Cork
Further information and ordering details: https://t.e2ma.net/webview/f70nob/70b16efcfe9c5ef0642f5c02170e7e86
John Banville by Neil Murphy
John Banville offers a close analysis of most of Banville’s major novels, as well as the ‘Quirke’ crime novels he has written under the pseudonym, Benjamin Black and his dramatic adaptations of Heinrich von Kleist’s plays. From the beginning, Banville’s work has been marked both by the presence of a complex, embedded discourse about the significance of art and by a concurrent self-conscious obsession with its own status as art. His novels perpetually reveal an overt fascination with the visual arts, in particular, and with the aesthetic principle of literature as art. This study argues that, as a whole, Banville’s work presents an elaborate and richly-textured coded account of his relationship with art and with the self-referential fictional world that his novels have conjured. It is from this critical context that John Banville’s central argument is derived.
Further information and ordering details: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781611488722/John-Banville#