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Colum McCann is one of the most important Irish writers in contemporary literary fiction. His work has been critically acclaimed across the globe for its artistic achievement, its thematic range and its ethical force. This Side of Brightness: Essays on the Fiction of Colum McCann is the first collection of scholarly essays to deal with McCann's oeuvre, drawing on the pioneering critical work of some of the leading figures in Irish literary studies. Touching on a host of central themes in McCann's writing - emigration, race, performance, poverty, travel, nationality and globalization - the volume covers each of McCann's publications and includes a substantial interview with the author. The book is an invaluable resource for current and future scholars of the Irish novel.
List of contents
Contents: Susan Cahill/Eóin Flannery: Introduction - Miriam O'Kane Mara/Rebecca Oster Bach: Seeking the Future in Fishing the Sloe-Black River - Amanda Tucker: Here and There: Reframing Diaspora in Songdogs - Derek Hand: Living in a Global World: Making Sense of Place in This Side of Brightness - Eóin Flannery: 'Troubles' Trilogy: Everything in This Country Must - Susan Cahill: Choreographing Memory: The Dancing Body and Temporality in Dancer - Anne Fogarty: 'An Instance of Concurrency': Transnational Environments in Zoli and Let the Great World Spin - Sylvie Mikowski: Nomadic Artists, Smooth Spaces and Lines of Flight: Reading Colum McCann through Joyce, and Deleuze and Guattari - Joseph Lennon: 'The First Man to Whistle': Two Interviews with Colum McCann.
About the author
Susan Cahill is Assistant Professor in the School of Canadian Irish Studies, Concordia University, Montreal. Her research interests include Irish children's literature and contemporary Irish literature, particularly women's writing. She is the author of
Irish Literature in the Celtic Tiger Years: Gender, Bodies, Memory (2011) and recently co-edited a collection of essays on Booker Prize-winning author Anne Enright. Her current research focuses on the literary culture of the Irish girl in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Eóin Flannery is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature in the Department of English and Modern Languages at Oxford Brookes University. His publications include:
Colum McCann and the Aesthetics of Redemption (2011);
Ireland and Postcolonial Studies: Theory, Discourse, Utopia (2009); and
Versions of Ireland: Empire, Modernity and Resistance in Irish Culture (2006). He is currently writing a book entitled
'Listening Deeply': Ecology, Postcolonialism and Social Justice in Irish Cultural History and completing a study of the work of Eugene McCabe.
