Hailed in the Irish
Times as a ‘great Irish novelist’, Neil Jordan is, in the words of Fintan
O’Toole, ‘a peculiarly emblematic figure of cultural change’. Yet,
extraordinarily, such critical acclaim has come about without detailed
scholarly engagement with Jordan’s most sustained interrogation of Ireland and
notions of Irishness: his fiction. Neil Jordan: Works for the page fills this
gap in contemporary Irish literary criticism, and, while Jordan’s filmmaking is
often discussed, the focus here is on his published work: his early volume of
short fiction, his many novels, and several of his uncollected stories. The
result is a work which will enhance understanding of contemporary Irish
cultural studies while also suggesting future directions for the criticism of
other artists operating in multiple creative disciplines.
·
Examination of Neil
Jordan’s changing relationship to modern Irish history through novels such as
The Past (1980) and Sunrise with Sea Monster (1994), and exploration of the
manner by which he represents the War of Independence, the Civil War, the
‘Emergency’ (World War II), the 1960s, 1980s, and the present day.
·
Detailed analysis of
Neil Jordan’s integration of the fantastic into his fiction, most obviously in
The Dream of a Beast (1983), but also reframing the later novels such as Shade
(2005) and Carnivalesque (2017) as more ambitious and speculative works than
they were initially received as.
·
Discussion of Neil
Jordan’s uncollected stories about the filmmaking process, how his work in
prose relates to his work in cinema, and how it is impossible to ignore his
writings any longer.
The significance of
this book lies in its discussion of what kind of artist Neil Jordan really is,
which is not necessarily the kind of artist that Irish Studies currently
perceives him to be. He is neither just an Oscar-winning filmmaker nor a
European novelist of the first rank, he is both, and the comprehensive introduction
to the literary author provided by Neil Jordan: Works for the Page has been
carefully structured to appeal to those familiar with only the filmmaker. This
engaging study examines how, in a forty-year writing career, Jordan has engaged
with and expanded upon many core concerns of Irish literature: the struggle to
define oneself against the weight of history, both political and artistic; the
quest to understand the nation’s violent efforts to transcend and process its
colonial past.