Mother’s Bag of Tricks: Irish Folklore, Tradition and Identity in John McGahern’s Fiction
Öz
Alienation makes the heroes in John McGahern’s stories behave or appear like
uncontrolled, wild and fearful creatures, anticipating a peril but unable to detect a precise danger
and the way to counteract its impact. The demarcation between the safe and unsafe territory is even
more difficult in circumstances related to death and funerals, as characters are transposed into
a symbolically-built space where images, sounds, colours, and domestic totems help or restrain
them, linking the visible to the subconscious. Diverse motifs from the animal, vegetal or human
realms, are accompanied by a panoply of stylistic means employed to take the readership into a
genuine Irish setting in which animal representations often mirror feelings of numerous humans,
from hope to despair, or frailty to rigidity. This paper aims to explore the way in which folkloreextracted
elements shape Irish identity and recurrently emerge in McGahern’s literary works, the
result being a unique mixture of imagery and personal memories implanted in both content and
narrative.
Anahtar Kelimeler
Kaynakça
- Bergen, F. (1895) Burial and holiday customsand beliefs of the Irish peasantry. The Journal of American Folklore, 19-25.
- Carassi, V. (2012) The Irish fairy tale: A narrative tradition from the middle ages to Yates and Stephens. (K. Wren, Trans.) Lanham, Maryland: John Cabot University Press.
- Cardin, B. (2009) Absence does not cast a shadow: Yeats’s Shadowy presence in McGahern’s „The wine breadth. Journal of the Short Story in English, 2-11.
- Collinge, L. & Vernadakis, E. (2003) John McGahern - b. 1934. Journal of the short story in English(41). Retrieved May 15, 2013
- Evans, E. E. (2000) Irish folk ways. Mineola, New York: Dover.
- Farquharson, D. (2009) Violence and ontological doubt in “The Stoat”. Journal of the Short Story in English(53) Retrieved from http://jsse.revues.org/1009.
- Harris, J. (2008) Folklore and the fantastic in nineteenth-century British fiction. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate.
- Lee, H. (2004, April 7) Readings and conversations: John McGahern. Retrieved May 10, 2013, from www.lannan.org: http://www.lannan.org/images/lit/john-mcgahern-040407- trans-conv.pdf
Ayrıntılar
Birincil Dil
İngilizce
Konular
Dilbilim, Sanat ve Edebiyat
Bölüm
Araştırma Makalesi
Yazarlar
Dana Radler
*
Bu kişi benim
Romania
Yayımlanma Tarihi
1 Mayıs 2018
Gönderilme Tarihi
15 Aralık 2016
Kabul Tarihi
3 Ocak 2018
Yayımlandığı Sayı
Yıl 2018 Cilt: 24 Sayı: 94