Stephen Butler

Pietra Palazzolo

Michael Springer

Bringing together leading international scholars, John Banville and His Precursors explores Booker and Franz Kafka prize-winning Irish author John Banville's most significant intellectual influences. The book explores how Banville's novels engage deeply with a wide range of sources, from literary figures such as Samuel Beckett, Heinrich von Kleist, Wallace Stevens, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Henry James, to thinkers such as Freud, Heidegger, and Blanchot. Reading the full range of Banville's writings - from his Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea to his latest book, Mrs Osmond – John Banville and His Precursors reveals the richness of the author's work. In this way, the book also raises questions about the contemporary moment's relationship to a variety of intellectual and cultural traditions - Romanticism, Modernism, existentialism – and how the significance of these can be appreciated in new and often surprising ways.

John Banville and His Precursors

Ben Pestell

Leon Burnett

Ever since Odysseus heard tales of his own exploits being retold among strangers, audiences and readers have been alive to the complications and questions arising from the translation of myth. How are myths taken and carried over into new languages, new civilizations, or new media? An international group of scholars is gathered in this volume to present diverse but connected case studies which address the artistic and political implications of the changing condition of myth – this most primal and malleable of forms. ‘Translation’ is treated broadly to encompass not only literary translation, but also the transfer of myth across cultures and epochs. In an age when the spiritual world is in crisis, Translating Myth constitutes a timely exploration of myth’s endurance, and represents a consolidation of the status of myth studies as a discipline in its own right.

Pietra Palazzolo

Books

Your next favorite book is out there