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A novelistic “family romance” from a key figure in contemporary literature, focusing with lyrical detail on his coming of age in Northern Ireland. Warrenpoint is a memoir, and more than a memoir: with moments of novelistic narrative and lyricism wedded to musings on the aesthetic and theological themes of the author’s coming of age—filial piety, original sin, a child’s perceptions, and then the nature of terrorism, and of reading itself—it demonstrates the same insight and lucidity that have contributed to Denis Donoghue’s fame as one of our most important critics. Taking its title from the seaside town in Northern Ireland whose police barracks served as the residence for the Catholic Donoghues, it has been described as a family romance, dealing not only with the author’s love for his strong-willed, taciturn, policeman father, but his love for literature and how it shaped his life to come.
On Eloquence questions the common assumption that eloquence is merely a subset of rhetoric, a means toward a rhetorical end. Denis Donoghue, an eminent and prolific critic of the English language, holds that this assumption is erroneous. In this book, Donoghue maintains that eloquence should be examined independent of mere rhetoric and that it has its own intrinsic value.
This lucid and elegantly written book is a sustained conversation about the nature and importance of literary interpretation. Distinguished critic Denis Donoghue argues that we must read texts closely and imaginatively, as opposed to merely or mistakenly theorizing about them. He shows what serious reading entails by discussing texts that range from Shakespeare's plays to a novel by Cormac McCarthy. Donoghue begins with a personal chapter about his own early experiences reading literature while he was living and teaching in Ireland. He then deals with issues of theory, focusing on the validity of different literary theories, on words and their performances, on the impingement of oral and wri...
When Denis Donoghue left Warrenpoint and went to Dublin in September 1946, he entered University College as a student of Latin and English. A few months later he also started as a student of lieder at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. These studies have informed his reading of English, Irish, and American literature. Now in this volume, one of our most distinguished readers of modern literature offers his most personal book of literary criticism. Donoghue's Words Alone is an intellectual memoir, a lucid and illuminating account of his engagement with the works of T. S. Eliot--from initial undergraduate encounters with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to later submission to Eliot's entire writings. "The pleasure of Eliot's words persists," Donoghue says, "only because in good faith it can't be denied." Submission to Eliot, in Donoghue's case, involves the ear as much as it does the mind. He is a reader who listens attentively and a writer whose own music in these pages commands attention. Whether he is writing about Eliot's poetry or confronting the (often contentious) prose, Donoghue eloquently demonstrates what it means to read and to hear a master of language.
Metaphor supposes that an ordinary word could have been used, but instead something unexpected appears. The point of a metaphor is to enrich experience by bringing different associations to mind, by giving something a different life. The prophetic character of metaphor, Denis Donoghue says, changes the world by changing our sense of it.
A foremost critic of the English language here reflects on beauty and the language that it inspires in authors from Kant to Keats, Hawthorne to Housman. "An excellent and eloquent book.”--James Wood, New York Times Book Review "A beautiful book about beauty. Enormously learned, allusive, recuperative, and citational, it is a passionate meditation on what has been said about beauty in the West from the Greeks to the present day.”--J. Hillis Miller "Donoghue talks . . . with a delightful informality and absence of dogma. . . . One of the most charming features of Denis Donoghue’s book is his appendix of 'afterwords,’ brief quotations on beauty from sundry writers.”--John Bayley, New York Review of Books "Continuously fascinating, continuously readable, the book speaks of beauty, and of speakers of beauty, in its own calm, steady voice. You won’t want to lay it down.”--Hugh Kenner
Denis Donoghue has been a key figure in Irish studies and an important public intellectual in Ireland, the UK and US throughout his career. These essays represent the best of his writing and operate in conversation with one another. He probes the questions of Irish national and cultural identity that underlie the finest achievements of Irish writing in all genres. Together, the essays form an unusually lively and far-reaching study of three crucial Irish writers – Swift, Yeats and Joyce – together with other voices including Mangan, Beckett, Trevor, McGahern and Doyle. Donoghue's forceful arguments, deep engagement with the critical tradition, buoyant prose and extensive learning are all exemplified in this collection. This book is essential reading for all those interested in Irish literature and culture and its far-reaching effects on the world.
A novelistic “family romance” from a key figure in contemporary literature, focusing with lyrical detail on his coming of age in Northern Ireland. Warrenpoint is a memoir, and more than a memoir: with moments of novelistic narrative and lyricism wedded to musings on the aesthetic and theological themes of the author’s coming of age—filial piety, original sin, a child’s perceptions, and then the nature of terrorism, and of reading itself—it demonstrates the same insight and lucidity that have contributed to Denis Donoghue’s fame as one of our most important critics. Taking its title from the seaside town in Northern Ireland whose police barracks served as the residence for the Catholic Donoghues, it has been described as a family romance, dealing not only with the author’s love for his strong-willed, taciturn, policeman father, but his love for literature and how it shaped his life to come.
Here is a selection by the distinguished critic of his essays and commentaries on American writing and writers, from Emerson and Whitman through Auden and Ashbery. Denis Donoghue examines the canon in the light of what he takes to be the central dynamic of the American enterprise--the imperatives of a powerful national past versus the subversions of an irrevocably anarchic spirit.
Essays discuss William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, James Stephens, Sean O'Casey, Frank O'Connor, Sean O'Faolain, and Irish society