Roddy Doyle: Raining on the Parade (Contemporary Irish Writers and Filmmakers) - Softcover

McCarthy, Dermot

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1904148255 ISBN 13: 9781904148258

Publisher: The Liffey Press, 2003

Synopsis

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, The Van), all of which have been filmed, 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". Others have criticised him for his "unflattering" depictions of modern Ireland. Doyle himself has long refused to participate in such pigeon-holing. Dermot McCarthy argues that Doyle's representation of working-class Dublin - in effect, an urban Ireland that had never been represented in Irish fiction or film before - 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 feel no connection to the nationalist or colonialist versions of Irish history and identity, but rather they negotiate a culture that is a complex processor of exogenous (largely American) influences and indigenous adaptation and assimilation. Doyle is a realistic novelist, a comic social-satirist, and latterly, a brilliantly inventive parodist whose fictions cohere around a single focal concern: the defence of the individual's struggle to live with dignity and decency in the face of all those forces which attempt to coerce the individual into accepting the way things are. Setting Doyle's six novels in the context of the seismic changes that have shaken Irish society in the last twenty years, McCarthy stakes a claim for Doyle as Ireland's pre-eminent chronicler of modern Ireland.

About this title

About the Author

Dermot McCarthy lectures in English at the University of Western Ontario in Canada.

Edition details

• Publisher: The Liffey Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1904148255
• ISBN 13: 9781904148258
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 280