Contributors
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction - Michael Springer, independent scholar
Part one: National and transnational currents
1. John Banville and the idea of the precursor: some meditations - Derek Hand, Dublin City University, Ireland
2. Unknown unity: Ireland and Europe in Beckett and Banville - Peter Boxall, University of Sussex, UK
Part two: Literary Engagements
3. 'The vain thing menaced by the touch of the real': John Banville as a precursor to Henry James - Darren Borg, Los Angeles Pierce College, USA
4. From Isabel Archer to Mrs Osmond: John Banville reinterprets Henry James - Elke D'hoker, University of Leuven, Belgium
5. Afterlives of a supreme fiction: John Banville's dialogue with Wallace Stevens - Pietra Palazzolo, The Open University, UK
6. Effacing the subject: Banville, Kleist and a world without people - Rebecca Downes, independent scholar
7. The limits of simile: Rilke, Stevens, and Banville's scepticism - Michael Springer
8. John Banville and Hugo von Hofmannsthal: language, mundane revelation, and profane sacrality - Joakim Wrethed, Stockholm University, Sweden
Part three: Philosophical, theoretical, and artistic forebears
9. 'A fool's errand': Blanchot, mourning, and The Sea - Karen McCarthy
10. Reading Banville with Lacan: hysteric aesthetics in The Book of Evidence - Mehdi Ghassemi, University of Lille, France
11. Existential precursors and contemporaries in Banville's Alex Cleave trilogy - Stephen Butler, Ulster University, Northern Ireland
12. 'an earthly glow': Heidegger and the uncanny in Eclipse and The Sea - Michael Springer
13. John Banville's ekphrastic experiments - Neil Murphy, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Index