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"In My Father's House": renegotiations of boyhood in life-writing by John McGahern, Ciaran O'Driscoll, Dermot Healy and Ciaran Carson

"In My Father's House": renegotiations of boyhood in life-writing by John McGahern, Ciaran O'Driscoll, Dermot Healy and Ciaran Carson
"In My Father's House": renegotiations of boyhood in life-writing by John McGahern, Ciaran O'Driscoll, Dermot Healy and Ciaran Carson
The records of boyhood in McGahern's Memoir, O'Driscoll's A Runner Among Falling Leaves, Healy's The Bend for Home and Carson's The Star Factory provide the basis for a examination of the formative influence of fathers upon their sons in mid-20th-century Ireland and of the evolution of the individuals and the writers through renegotiating their memories of childhood and adolescence. It is argued that to varying degrees each of the writers acknowledges the ways in which he has knowingly constructed the life he tells, but also that by opening up the larger question of the degree to which all history is the product of complex acts of selection, construction, false memory and imagination, Healy and Carson's books especially may be placed within the wider project of reassessing received versions of the past which characterised much late 20th-century Irish writing and scholarship.
boyhood in ireland in the mid-20th century, the relationship between sons and their fathers, formative influences on writers, the relationship between personal and national history
0013-2683
218-241
Sloan, Barry
4192a9d4-0959-4e09-b22a-e98c0436da24
Sloan, Barry
4192a9d4-0959-4e09-b22a-e98c0436da24

Sloan, Barry (2009) "In My Father's House": renegotiations of boyhood in life-writing by John McGahern, Ciaran O'Driscoll, Dermot Healy and Ciaran Carson. [in special issue: Children, Childhood, and Irish Society] Éire Ireland, 44 (1&2), Spring Issue, 218-241. (doi:10.1353/eir.0.0035).

Record type: Article

Abstract

The records of boyhood in McGahern's Memoir, O'Driscoll's A Runner Among Falling Leaves, Healy's The Bend for Home and Carson's The Star Factory provide the basis for a examination of the formative influence of fathers upon their sons in mid-20th-century Ireland and of the evolution of the individuals and the writers through renegotiating their memories of childhood and adolescence. It is argued that to varying degrees each of the writers acknowledges the ways in which he has knowingly constructed the life he tells, but also that by opening up the larger question of the degree to which all history is the product of complex acts of selection, construction, false memory and imagination, Healy and Carson's books especially may be placed within the wider project of reassessing received versions of the past which characterised much late 20th-century Irish writing and scholarship.

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Published date: 2009
Keywords: boyhood in ireland in the mid-20th century, the relationship between sons and their fathers, formative influences on writers, the relationship between personal and national history
Organisations: English

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 68727
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/68727
ISSN: 0013-2683
PURE UUID: c7a7dc57-0bcb-497e-be7a-4ba4552979dc

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Date deposited: 24 Sep 2009
Last modified: 13 Mar 2024 19:05

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