Roddy Doyle : raining on the parade / Dermot McCarthy.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McCarthy, Dermot, 1948-

Series:

Contemporary Irish writers and filmmakers

Contemporary Irish writers

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Doyle, Roddy, 1958---Criticism and interpretation.

Doyle, Roddy.

Doyle, Roddy, 1958-.

Criticism and interpretation.

Physical Description:

xvii, 265 pages ; 22 cm.

Place of Publication:

Dublin : Liffey Press, 2003.

Summary:

Roddy Doyle is the most successful Irish writer to emerge in the 1990s. All of his novels have been bestsellers, from the early Barrytown Trilogy (The Commitments. The Snapper and The Van), through the Booker Prize-winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, and up to his revisionist A Star Called Henry. It is largely because of this popularity, and of the perceived anti-intellectual thrust of his fiction, that many critics have refused to recognise him as "literary". Doyle himself has long scorned such pigeon-holing. Dermot McCarthy argues that Doyle's representation of working-class Dublin has broken with the traditional literary view of the Irish as a homogeneous "people" and has given a voice to a little-heard side of modern Ireland. His characters negotiate a culture that is a complex processor of exogenous influences and indigenous adaptation and assimilation. At the same time, they must negotiate an identity between the often conflicting demands of self-expression and individualism and belonging to a family, community or nation. Doyle's fictions cohere around a single concern: the defence of the individual's struggle to live with dignity and decency during the seismic changes that have shaken Irish society in recent times. Setting Doyle's six novels in the context of these changes, McCarthy stakes a claim for Doyle as the pre-eminent chronicler of contemporary Ireland.

Contents:

Introduction: Raining on the Parade: Roddy Doyle, the 1990s, and the Myth of the "New Ireland" 1

Chapter 1 Gettin' Up: The Commitments and "Dublin Soul" 21

Chapter 2 Sweating Perception: The Snapper 53

Chapter 3 Messin' with Normal: The Van 87

Chapter 4 Growing Pain: Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha 119

Chapter 5 What went wrong with Daddy?": Family and The Woman Who Walked into Doors 155

Chapter 6 A Shocking Substitute: A Star Called Henry and Satire as Revisionist Fiction 191

Conclusion: "We are on our own, but we are together. We sustain ourselves" 227.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [241]-252) and index.

ISBN:

1904148255

OCLC:

51737766