Niamh Campbell, Sacred Weather. Atmospheric Essentialism in the Work of John McGahern

Abstract

The number of books of criticism on the work of John McGahern could now approximate twenty, notwithstanding the numerous Master theses and PhD dissertations presented in universities around the world, which tells a lot about the canonical status reached by the novelist in his own country where he started out being considered “parochial”, then somehow outrageous, at the time when his second novel The Dark was censored and he lost his job as a primary school teacher. More recently, the trend in...