Derek Hand – författare

Derek Hand's A History of the Irish Novel is a major work of criticism on some of the greatest and most globally recognisable writers of the novel form. Writers such as Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett and John McGahern have demonstrated the extraordinary intellectual range, thematic complexity and stylistic innovation of Irish fiction. Derek Hand provides a remarkably detailed picture of the Irish novel's emergence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He shows the story of the genre is the story of Ireland's troubled relationship to modernisation. The first critical synthesis of the Irish novel from the seventeenth century to the present day, this is a major book for the field, and the first to thematically, theoretically and contextually chart its development. It is an essential, entertaining and highly original guide to the history of the Irish novel.

Companion to the Contemporary Irish Novel traces the cultural shift that began in the 1980s and continues through new ideological structures, new ways of telling stories, and a radically transformed sense of the very meaning of Irishness. This period of relentless disruption of Ireland's social, demographic, religious, and economic frames also offered immense imaginative possibilities to its writers. In direct contrast to the longer history of Irish writing’s persistent fascination with stasis, insularity, tradition, and paralysis, this volume addresses one of the most tumultuous periods of social transformation in Irish history. Defined more by change and structural transformation as the guiding principles, this is a period of shifting values, a reimagining of cultural frames, and a rewriting of the primary narratives of what it meant to be Irish. Bringing together scholars from across the field, Companion to the Contemporary Irish Novel explores the anxieties expressed and examined within Irish contemporary novels to offer a complete contextualized reading that traces vital changes in Irish government, economy, social values, and national identity.