John McGahern and the Imagination of Tradition

John McGahern and the Imagination of Tradition presents McGahern as a novelist of ideas by showing how his fiction engages in a knowing and self-conscious way with ideas about literature from different historical periods. It is a study of McGahern's fiction seen through the literary influences that shaped his imagination, which argues that McGahern's imagination absorbed things that interested him in the writers he had read and thought about, often for many decades, in order to make an art that was at once wholly individual and deeply traditional. In thematically arranged chapters on McGahern's debt to authors such as Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Wordsworth, the nineteenth-century Realists, Proust, Joyce, Yeats, Beckett and others, it demonstrates how well-known tropes and ideas from those authors are repeatedly reworked or re-imagined, often in ironic ways, in his fiction.