Ray Ryan – författare

While political connections between Ireland and Scotland have been vigorously promoted in recent years, Ray Ryan presents the first sustained, comparative study of literature and culture from both sites. Ryan's focus is on the Irish state and the Scottish nation. How does literature from the Republic create the cultural shape and personality of the Irish state? Through comparison with Scotland, a stateless nation, Ryan argues that crucial themes in Irish culture emerge with new force and clarity: themes such as Republicanism and colonialism, the city and rural divide, and the partition of the island into separate 'southern' and 'northern' spheres. Analysing a broad range of Irish and Scottish literary texts, Ryan shifts attention from the traditionally defined canon of Irish culture, and establishes the relevance of Scotland for any future discussion of Irish cultural contexts. Offering a radical intervention across a range of disciplines, this book is essential reading for all those working on Ireland, on Scotland, and on contemporary English and British culture.

There remains at work - in both Britain and America - a group of literary journalists and academics committed to the evaluative criticism of fiction, to a criticism that approaches novels as novels. The Good of the Novel is a collection of specially commissioned essays - edited by Ray Ryan and LIam McIlvanney - on the contemporary Anglophone novel. Bringing together some of the most strenuous and perceptive critics of the present moment and putting them in contact with some of the finest novels of the past three decades, it examines what the novel does and what kinds of truth the novel can tell. What is it that the novel knows? What is it about the language used in a novel that creates a world different from that of drama or poetry? And how does a particular novel emplify this? These questions can be answered by the careful examination of particular great works by strong evaluative critics. Robert Macfarlane on Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty; Tessa Hadley examining Coetzee's Disgrace; and Ian Sansom on Roth's American Pastoral - just some of the essays that are to be found in this insightful, intelligent and illuminating book.