Description
This book provides a comprehensive overview of the work of one of Irelands most prominent yet also critically neglected writers, Brendan Kennelly. While covering his output from 1959 onwards, the chosen approach is systematic rather than chronological. Shedding light on Kennellys poems, novels, and plays from different angles History and Politics, Spaces/Places: Country, City, Nature, Religion and Ethics as well as Gender and Sexuality Kennellys development is traced from his neo-Romanticist beginnings to a critical and highly provocative postmodern stance, above all in the later long poems: Cromwell, The Book of Judas, and Poetry My Arse. While this study is certainly valuable as an introduction for the general reader, combining in-depth analyses of the most important works with general contextual information, the embedding of these analyses within a larger theoretical framework (including deconstruction, postcolonial theory, or gender studies) will also challenge the more experienced Kennellyan. Brendan Kennelly is a painstaking critic of todays complacencies, inhibitions and violence, a scrupulous analyst of society, and an uncompromising reader of the past who, nevertheless, remains self-critical throughout.
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