Outstaring Nature's Eye: The Fiction of John McGahern

This first book-length study of the fiction of John McGahern traces his development as an artist by providing a detailed reading of each of his five novels and three collections of stories. In The Barracks (1963) and The Dark (1965), McGahern's unapologetic eye for shocking truths and his scrupulous preoccupation with style and form made comparisons to the young James Joyce commonplace. The mantle of "silence, exile and cunning" also seemed to fit the young novelist, who was fired from his job and whose second novel was banned. The Leavetaking and The Pornographer won him renewed acclaim in the 1970s, but the breakthrough into recognition as a major novelist - the peer of Seamus Heaney and Brian Friel - did not come until the publication of Amongst Women, which in 1992 won McGahern the prestigious GPA (Guinness Peat Aviation) Prize of 8