1st Edition
Wallace Stevens and the Contemporary Irish Novel Order, Form, and Creative Un-Doing
Chapter Two: In Search of Fictive Order: John Banville’s Scientific Tetralogy and Wallace Stevens’s "Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction"
Chapter Three: Solipsism and Accommodation: The Function of Art in Banville’s The Blue Guitar and Stevens’s "The Man with the Blue Guitar"
Chapter Four: Fragmented Vision and New Possibilities: Stevens’s "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" and Colum McCann’s formalistic experiments
Chapter Five: The Place of the Mind at the End of Things: Stevens’s "The Snow Man" and Questions of Travel in Ed O’Loughlin’s Minds of Winter and Emma Donoghue’s Haven
Chapter Six: Myth, Senescence, and the Limits of Transcendental Union in Wallace Stevens’s Late Poetry and Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea and The Message to the Planet
Biography
Ian Tan is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He received his PhD in English from the University of Warwick, and is interested in modern and contemporary fiction and the relationship between modernist writing, poetics, literary theory and film. He is the author of Wallace Stevens and Martin Heidegger: Poetry as Appropriative Proximity (2022) and Understanding Barbara Kingsolver (forthcoming 2023), and the editor of Wallace Stevens in Theory (forthcoming 2023). His numerous essays on contemporary fiction and literary theory have appeared in venues such as English Literary History, Poetics Today, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Textual Practice and Style.
"Nuanced and wide-ranging, Tan’s important study is the first full-length exploration of the remarkable transatlantic and cross-generic affinity between American modernist poet Wallace Stevens and Irish novelists from John Banville and Colum McCann to Iris Murdoch and Emma Donoghue. Tan’s expert interrogation of the literary mediation of the philosophical opposition between appearance and reality reveals that in Stevens’ poetry, as in the Irish novel, ‘form is articulated under the pressure of its own unmaking’."
-- Professor Lee M. Jenkins, School of English and Digital Humanities, University College Cork
