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Murphy, Neil
About the author: Neil Murphy earned his PhD in English at University College, Dublin and he is currently Assistant Professor of English at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has previously taught at University College, Galway, Ireland and the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. He has published reviews and articles on Irish writing and contemporary fiction in Graph, The Irish University Review, The Irish Review, Irish Literary Supplement, The Review of Contemporary Fiction and Asylum.
2004 0-7734-6518-9This study situates three contemporary Irish novelists, Aidan Higgins, John Banville and Neil Jordan in the context of Modernist and Postmodernist literature. In order to map how these writers respond to the problems of epistemological doubt, their work is positioned beside that of other writers like Rushdie, Nabokov, Calvino, Garcia-Marquez and Robbe-Grillet. In addition, the opening chapter outlines a working position on the meaning and significance of Postmodernism, as it pertains to literary fiction, with particular reference to the work of Brian McHale, Ihab Hassan, Patricia Waugh, David Harvey, Richard Kearney and David Lodge. Although firmly rooted in Irish literary studies, this work represents a departure from recent critical work in Irish literature in that it seeks, responding to the specificity of the fictionalized concerns of these writers, to contextualize the fictions of Higgins, Banville and Jordan within Irish and international literary traditions, rather than in an Irish historical or political framework.