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"Bringing together leading international scholars, John Banville and His Precursors explores Booker and Franz Kafka prize-winning Irish author John Banville's most significant intellectual influences. The book explores how Banville's novels engage deeply with a wide range of sources, from literary figures such as Samuel Beckett, Heinrich Von Kleist, Wallace Stevens, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Henry James, to thinkers such as Freud, Heidegger, and Blanchot. Reading the full range of Banville's writings - from his Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea to his latest book, Mrs Osbourne - John Banville and His Precursors reveals the richness of the author's work. In this way, the book also raises questions about the contemporary moment's relationship to a variety of intellectual and cultural traditions -- Romanticism, Modernism, existentialism -- and how the significance of these can be appreciated in new and often surprising ways."-- John Banville and the idea of the precursor : some meditations / Derek Hand -- Unknown unity : Ireland and Europe in Beckett and Banville / Peter Boxall -- "The vain thing menaced by the touch of the real" : John Banville as a precursor to Henry James / Darren Borg -- From Isabel Archer to Mrs Osmond : John Banville reinterprets Henry James / Elke D'hoker -- Afterlives of a supreme fiction : John Banville's dialogue with Wallace Stevens / Pietra Palazzolo -- Effacing the subject : Banville, Kleist and a world without people / Rebecca Downes -- The limits of simile : Rilke, Stevens, and Banville's scepticism / Michael Springer -- John Banville and Hugo Von Hofmannsthal : language, mundane revelation, and profane sacrality / Joakim Wrethed -- "A fool's errand" : Blanchot, mourning, and the sea / Karen McCarthy -- Reading Banville with Lacan : hysteric aesthetics in the Book of evidence / Mehdi Ghassemi -- Existential precursors and contemporaries in Banville's Alex Cleave trilogy / Stephen Butler -- "An earthly glow" : Heidegger and the uncanny in Eclipse and the sea / Michael Springer -- John Banville's ekphrastic experiments / Neil Murphy Index.
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