''John Banville: A Critical Study'' is a
1991
File:1991 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: Boris Yeltsin, elected as Russia's first president, waves the new flag of Russia after the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt, orchestrated by Soviet hardliners; Mount Pinatubo erupts in the Phil ...
book by
Joseph McMinn, which deals with the work of major
turn of the century writer
John Banville
William John Banville (born 8 December 1945) is an Irish novelist, short story writer, adapter of dramas and screenwriter. Though he has been described as "the heir to Proust, via Nabokov", Banville himself maintains that W. B. Yeats and Henry J ...
. It is part of ''Gill's Studies in Irish Literature'' series. McMinn claims to take a different approach to the "
formalist" Rüdiger Imhof, who had until that time been the only other writer to treat of Banville's fiction (in his 1989 book ''
John Banville: A Critical Introduction'').
[
As the book was published in 1991, it deals only with Banville's works as far as the late-1980s. Almost two thirds of the book focus on the novels '']Doctor Copernicus
''Doctor Copernicus'' is a novel by John Banville, first published in 1976. "A richly textured tale" about Nicolaus Copernicus, it won that year's James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
''Doctor Copernicus'' contains four sections. The first two focus ...
'', '' Kepler'', ''The Newton Letter
''The Newton Letter'' is a 1982 novella by John Banville. Drawing comparisons with Ford Madox Ford's ''The Good Soldier'' and John Hawkes's '' The Blood Oranges'' for their use of the unreliable narrator, ''The Newton Letter'' was described in ...
'' and ''Mefisto'', while the remaining third focus on the short stories, the two early novels and the recently published work '' The Book of Evidence''.[ Gerry Dukes, reviewing McMinn's book for ''Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review'', described it as "not particularly distinguished... in that, while it promises much, it contrives to deliver very little of critical substance", though praised its accounts of ''Kepler'' and ''Doctor Copernicus'' as "sufficiently informative and elegant to induce regret that the others are mere dim sightings".]1999
File:1999 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The funeral procession of King Hussein of Jordan in Amman; the 1999 İzmit earthquake kills over 17,000 people in Turkey; the Columbine High School massacre, one of the first major school shootin ...
, McMinn expanded upon this text to include Banville's works from the 1990s.[ ''Weekend''.]
References
External links
*
1991 non-fiction books
Macmillan Publishers books
Critical Study, A
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