Bøker i Cambria Contemporary Literature, Film, and Theory Series-serien

This book examines the political meanings of Tony Harrison s imaginative works and offers a reassessment of the poet s political character. While Harrison s class political analysis has been central to much of the discussion of his poetry, his concern with colonialism still generates relatively little commentary. The nature of his republicanism and its importance for his poetry has been neglected, while his humanism tends to be seen as at odds with his politics. This study discusses Harrison s concern with internal colonialism in the United Kingdom and internationalist anti-colonial poetic. It witnesses the radical political inclusiveness of his humanism and his giving the dispossessed a voice in his high cultural poetry. Particular attention is accorded to his ambiguous identification with John Milton as a great republican poet, his location of Milton and himself in a radical republican literary lineage, and his wider excavation of that lineage. It also illuminates Harrison s unnoticed elective affinity with Arthur Rimbaud as a regional poet with the wrong accent, as a hoodlum poet who fell silent and became an explorer and fortune-seeker in Africa, as a white n gre , and as the great outsider now f ted as a high cultural poet. Harrison s political convictions and loyalties will be shown to be consistent in the different historical, literary, and social contexts that the poems take as their subjects, or that are opened up by their allusive fields. The book will newly establish that the creative dialectical interplay between the class, anti-colonial, and radical republican and humanist aspects of the poetry, and his literary elective affinities, are essential for understanding the aesthetics and the politics of the Rimbaud of Leeds.

Pat Barker is one of the most compelling of the current generation of British novelists, especially in her use of the novel as an instrument of social critique, fashioning a literature which does not shy away from asking thorny questions, refusing the doctrinaire of what goes without saying, suspicious of simple answers. To date she has published eleven novels, some of which have been adapted for stage and screen. Barker s Regeneration trilogy was highly acclaimed, the second volume The Eye in the Door (1993), won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and the third, The Ghost Road (1995), was awarded the Booker Prize. Other accolades include the Fawcett Society Book Prize for Union Street (1982), the 1996 Booksellers Association Author of the Year Award, and in 2000, Barker was named Commander of the British Empire. While Barker has been variously categorized as a regional, realist, feminist or war writer, her concern with the complexity of human reality sets her apart from many of her contemporaries, resisting as she does the temptation to romanticize working-class life or wartime experience. Barker s prostitutes are also wives, mothers, and friends, while her soldiers are often afraid, even hysterical, sometimes homosexual; formulaic, black-and-white categories disintegrate in Barker s hands. While Barker s work has been approached through several critical lenses, feminist and psychoanalytic among them, this study proposes examining Barker s novels from the angle of the social representations theory (especially as elucidated by Serge Moscovici), since social representations are the condition of the ongoing discourse which defines and maintains human reality as members of a group. Through time, social representations become reified, and their normative, prescriptive role develops into the natural order of things. Conversely, social representations can be deployed to challenge dominant ideologies, to expose the irrational fa ade of human reality, to seek something resembling truth. It is this dilemma of social representations, how they are used and abused and to what purpose, that Barker explores so deeply. This theoretical approach seems especially adapted to Barker s work, given her obvious concern with the articulation between the mediated foundation of contemporary human society, and our collective difficulty in representing genuine human experiences which elude easy representation. In this critical study, David Waterman examines questions of social representation in all of Pat Barker s novels, published over the last twenty-five years, from Union Street (1982) to the recent Life Class (2007), especially the ways in which Barker encourages us to interrogate the reality created by such conventionalizing, prescriptive representations in favor of a reality more accurately represented through a critical assessment of the uses and abuses of collective representations. Barker s principal characters are out of step with the natural order of things; they question cultural constructions like masculinity, heroism, the unquestionable right of institutions, and they worry about their role as members of the larger community. Such questions are often, fundamentally, questions of representation, whether we examine how existing representations serve to maintain the status quo, or whether we are interested in how to represent the horrors of war or the atrocities of civil life, how to give voice to trauma in an effort to approach something resembling truth in other words, how best to represent the kinds of human experiences which resist representation. Pat Barker and the Mediation of Social Reality is an important book for scholars interested in contemporary British fiction, women s writing, and social-psychological approaches to literature.

Ian McEwan s works have always shown an interest in the question of how fiction operates. This interest does not usually manifest on the formal level. A few of the early stories aside, his fictions are not formally experimental. McEwan tends to opt for those reliable patternings of space, time and narrative progression that enable readers to trust the authorial environment sufficiently to identify with characters and become invested, to some extent, in what happens to them. Readers frequently enter the mind or consciousness of a central character that of Stephen, in The Child in Time (1987), when he realizes he has lost his daughter at the supermarket, or Joe s, in Enduring Love (1997), when he helps saves a boy in a balloon from dying and observe the decisions they make and the actions that follow from them. Nonetheless, McEwan s early stories and first two short novels of the 1970s and early 1980s, The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981), in particular, contain characters who resist readerly identification. Despite McEwan s commitment, by and large, to naturalistic means of telling a story, his later novels also demonstrate a concern with opacity, as characters often pursue courses of action for reasons that are unclear to them. Equally often, these actions bear some relation to the intrinsic opacity or enigma of one s sexual desires, one s relation to one s mortality, or one s relation to the actions of those human beings who have gone before one, as this book will show. It is this focus on enigma in McEwan s work, whether sexual, mortal, or historical, that lends it to a psychoanalytic reading such as the kind pursued in this book, because for psychoanalysis there is no such thing as full access to one s self or to one s feelings or motivations. Given that one s relation to history is also opaque in the sense that one grasps fully or imagines one grasps fully only those historical events which predate or otherwise excludes one, this study seeks historical reasons for why McEwan sometimes blocks readerly identification with characters in the early fiction. For these characters are also products of their environments, environments which the characters relative opacity and unlikeability seems to offset and exaggerate or present in a manner showcased for one's judgment. And in this way the characters environment is denaturalized, to say the least. This book reveals how all of these works explore, to some extent, the human tendency to act and feel, in particular situations, in profound contradistinction to how one might prefer to think one would. This failure to coincide with one s image of how one would have expected, or preferred, to behave The Innocent s Leonard Marnham is not the cool, experienced lover of his imaginings, any more than Solar s Michael Beard is going to revamp his lifestyle or career produces instances of affective or imaginative excess, troubling images or feelings that can often only be allayed or dealt with by a further failure to coincide with one s desires. In this book, author Eluned Summers-Bremner shows that McEwan s interests in opacity not only become clear in significance and import but that his interests in human failure to coincide with one s views about the past and hopes for the future also appear as what they are: an ongoing concern with how one relates to the complex operation of human history.

Rebecca Brown has been dubbed the great secret of American letters. This Seattle-based lesbian author is especially known for being a writers writer, although her award-winning and widely translated book The Gifts of the Body is popular with an international reading audience. Brown s powerful, original, and extremely diverse oeuvre contains collections of essays and short stories, a modern bestiary, a fictionalized autobiography, a memoir in the guise of a medical dictionary, a libretto for a dance opera, a play, and various kinds of fantasy. Brown has a uniquely recognizable voice, writing as she does in a stark style that combines the minimalism of her literary ancestor Samuel Beckett with some of the incantatory rhythms of Gertrude Stein and the dark humor of Franz Kafka. Brown has been praised as an important source of inspiration by several contemporary authors such as the acclaimed Scottish writer Ali Smith. Unlike her more illustrious lesbian colleagues Sarah Waters and Jeanette Winterson, Rebecca Brown has been working in the shadows for the past thirty years to compose a challenging and highly rewarding oeuvre. Her writings form a fascinating countervoice to the current trend of homonormalization. Brown s unapologetic representations of violent or imbalanced same-sex relations and communities, as well as her fictional engagement with a history of homosexual stigmatization (and its continuation into the present), are of great cultural significance. Yet academic investigations of her oeuvre are still largely lacking. Thanks to its analysis of identities and identifications, this book covers the main areas that are of interest when studying Brown s oeuvre: the spheres of the social and the historical. In addition, the book reveals how literary texts like Brown s can resonate, substantiate, and inflect queer theory as well as social and psychoanalytic theories on (gendered or sexual) identifications. This book is the first study to examine critically the entire oeuvre of Rebecca Brown. It approaches Brown s work from the perspective of queer theory and social theory on identities and identifications. This framework is supplemented with critical appropriations of classic psychoanalytic thinking on the related concepts of incorporation, melancholia, and narcissism. A number of critics have recently sought to redefine theories on social identity-construction by shifting the debate from the notion of identity to the more dynamic concept of identification. Such theories benefit from a concerted attention to literary texts that embody identification processes, put them to the test, and make them tangible. Brown s closely considered writings offer an unusually rewarding case study in this respect, and require attention to both the spheres of the social and the historical. The book explores the processes of identity formation in Brown s work in two social contexts: that of biological and queer kinship. It examines Brown s demythologization of the nuclear family and argues that in the context of queer kinship, too, Brown s presentations take the form of a critical examination (tackling taboo subjects such as identity-formation in positions of extreme dependency). The book also explores the historical identifications taking place in Brown s oeuvre, addressing their autobiographical nature and contesting a reading of Brown s characters as traditional minority subjects in full possession of their life stories. This is an important book for research on women writers, queer studies, and contemporary literature.

The prevailing view is that existentialism is a product of post World War II Europe and had no significant presence in the United States before the 1940s. Jean-Paul Sartre and associates are credited with establishing the philosophy in France, and later introducing it to Americans. But conventional wisdom about existentialism in the United States is mistaken. The United States actually developed its own unique brand of existentialism several years before Sartre and company published their first existentialist works. Film noir, and the hard-boiled fiction that served as its initial source material, represent one form of American existentialism that was produced independently of European philosophy. Hard-boiled fiction introduced the tough and savvy private detective, the duplicitous femme-fatale, the innocent victim of circumstance, and the confessing but remorseless murderer. Creators of this uniquely American crime genre engaged existential themes of isolation, anxiety, futility, and death in the thrilling context of the urban crime thriller. The film noir cycle of Hollywood cinema brought these features to the screen, and offered a distinctively dark visual style compatible with the unorthodox narrative techniques of hard-boiled fiction writers. Film noir has gained critical acceptance for its artistic merit, and the term has a ubiquitous presence in American culture. Americans have much to gain by recognizing their own contributors to the history of existentialism. Existentialism, Film Noir, and Hard-Boiled Fiction describes and celebrates a unique form of existentialism produced mostly by and for working-class people. Faison s analysis of the existentialist value of early twentieth-century crime stories and films illustrates that philosophical ideas are available from a rich diversity of sources. Faison examines the plight of philosophy, which occupies a small corner of the academy, and is largely ignored beyond its walls. According to the author, philosophers do themselves and the public a disservice when they restrict what is called existentialism, or philosophy, to that which the academy traditionally approves. The tendency to limit the range of sanctioned material led the professional community to miss the philosophical importance of the critically acclaimed phenomenon known as film noir, and significantly contributes to the contemporary status of philosophy. Existentialism, Film Noir, and Hard-Boiled Fiction properly identifies existentialism, not as the original creation of post World War II Europeans, but as a shorthand term used to describe a compelling vision of the world. The themes associated with existentialism are found in the ancient Greek tragedies, and dramatic narrative has been the preferred conveyance of the existentialist message. American and European philosophers present during the early decades of the twentieth century, agreed that the United States was not fertile soil for the existentialist message, but the popularity of hard-boiled fiction and film noir contradicts such claims. Faison examines and emphasizes the working-class origins and orientation of hard-boiled fiction to reveal the division between elites and working-class Americans that led to the ill-informed conclusion. Faison effectively challenges the frequent assertion that the intellectual and creative sources of film noir are to be found in European thinkers and movements, and establishes film noir, like hard-boiled fiction, as a uniquely American phenomenon. Existentialism, Film Noir, and Hard-Boiled Fiction is scholarly and accessible, and will appeal to academics interested in existentialism, philosophy, and interdisciplinary studies, film enthusiasts interested in the narrative and visual techniques employed in film noir, and fans of hard-boiled mystery fiction and the work of screen legends of the Hollywood studio era.

Hailed as one of the most powerful and moving poets of his generation, Galway Kinnell has been commended by critics who often pair his name with such famous predecessors as Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Robert Frost, W. B. Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, and Theodore Roethke. Born on February 1, 1927, Galway Kinnell has been working on the strength and truthfulness of his voice for almost five decades now. This well-written work offers a very important perspective on a major living poet, focusing specifically on what is a key theme in Kinnell s work and death. The author s thematic analysis does not stop short with a direct reading of the poetry, it also seeks to place her subject within several contexts, including that problematic pivotal position between Modernism and Postmodernism, and a specific poetic tradition (including T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Whitman and Dickinson). What emerges from the readings of Kinnell s various poetry collections is essentially an extended philosophical meditation on death, that both offers itself as a commentary whilst also repeatedly showing, with much clarity, how complex a subject death is for Kinnell. This meditation on death also means a deep consideration of those other large themes that have asserted themselves in American poetry, transcendentalism, nature, and life itself magnified against the darkness of death in the poet s work. This volume will make an important contribution to research on Kinnell and the author s ability to follow her subject into a very complex labyrinth of philosophical and aesthetic discussions, while always being mindful that Kinnell remains central, offers much in the way of a good example of literary analysis and scholarship. This book makes a significant contribution to scholarship on Galway Kinnell, a major contemporary poet whose work will receive more and more attention over the coming years. In addition, this work also marks a contribution to scholarship on poetry, American literature and contemporary literature, as well as to the fascination with death as a theme in much of American literature, from Dickinson and Poe to Plath and Salinger. Death in the Works of Galway Kinnell will be a very valuable resource for students and teachers of contemporary poetry and American literature.

This book is, above all, a highly informed guide to students and readers of literature, for whom the world of literary study has become a maze of theoretical hurdles. The intention is to equip readers with the necessary skills to restore vitality to the act of reading literary texts, crucially, in the moment of engagement with text. Beyond this central aim lies the attendant wish to restore the study of literature to the centre of civil life within modern society. This book makes an enormous and timely contribution to the study of literature in the context of the major debates surrounding literary studies in recent decades without reducing the primary literary texts to footnotes during the act of reading. Chapters include an appraisal of intention, and translation, interpreting poetry, and the relation between literature and philosophy, always framed against a rich tapestry of literary texts drawn from many cultures and periods. Reading Literature After Deconstruction will be an extremely valuable resource for students and scholars of literature, literary theory, and theories of reading.

Reading Blindly attempts to conceive of the possibility of an ethics of reading reading being understood as the relation to an other that occurs prior to any semantic or formal identification, and therefore prior to any attempt at assimilating what is being read to the one who reads. Hence, reading can no longer be understood in the classical tradition of hermeneutics as a deciphering according to an established set of rules as this would only give a minimum of correspondence, or relation, between the reader, and what is read. In fact, reading can no longer be understood as an act, since an act by necessity would impose the rules of the reader upon the structure of what (s)he encounters; in other words the reader would impose herself upon the text. Since it is neither an act nor a rule-governed operation, reading needs to be thought as an event of an encounter with an other and more precisely an other which is not the other as identified by the reader, but heterogeneous in relation to any identifying determination. Being an encounter with an undeterminable other an other who is other than other reading is hence an unconditional relation, a relation therefore to no fixed object of relation. Hence, reading can be claimed to be the ethical relation par excellence. Since reading is a pre-relational relationality, what the reader encounters, however, may only be encountered before any phenomenon: reading is hence a non-phenomenal event or even the event of the undoing of all phenomenality. This is a radical reconstitution of reading positing blindness as that which both allows reading to take place and is also its limit. As there is always an aspect of choice in reading one has to choose to remain open to the possibility of the other Reading Blindly, by extension, is also a rethinking of ethics; constantly keeping in mind the impossibility of articulating an ethics which is not prescriptive. Hence, Reading Blindly is ultimately an attempt at the impossible: to speak of reading as an event. And since this is un-theorizable lest it becomes a prescriptive theory Reading Blindly is the positing of reading as reading, through reading, where texts are read as a test site for reading itself. Ostensibly, Reading Blindly works at the intersections of literature and philosophy; and will interest readers who are concerned with either discipline. However as reading is re-constituted as a pre-relational relationality, it is also a re-thinking of communication itself a rethinking of the space between; the medium in which all communication occurs and by extension, the very possibility of communicating with each other, with another. As such, this work is, in the final gesture, a meditation on the finitude and exteriority in literature, philosophy calling into question the very possibility of correspondence, and relationality and hence knowledge itself. For all that can be posited is that reading first and foremost is an acknowledgement that the text is ultimately unknowable; where reading is positing, and which exposes itself to nothing and is in fidelity to nothing but the possibility of reading.

Since the publication of his first novel, Americana, in 1971, Don DeLillo has been regarded as a preeminent figure of American letters. Among the more prominent themes the author considers throughout his oeuvre is that of consumerism, a topic that is equally essential to the works of French social theorist Jean Baudrillard. Although many critics have glossed the affinities between DeLillo and Baudrillard, this is the first book-length study to explore the relationship between the American author and the French theorist. Bringing DeLillo and Baudrillard into dialogue with each other, this timely volume proffers a sophisticated theoretical framework for understanding the works of both figures, investigates the relationship between works of art and acts of terror, and examines the potential for the individual to survive in the face of the dehumanizing, market-driven forces that dominate the postmodern world. This book will be a valuable addition to collections in American literature, sociology, critical theory, politics, and philosophy.

This new study of American poetry views the poetics of Ezra Pound and his avant-garde followers in an entirely new light. Both Romanticism and Modernism have variously been seen as revolutionary or retrograde, narcissistic or self-abnegating. This interdisciplinary work looks past distinctions between schools and styles to reveal an unexpected link between poets spiritual aspirations, formal experiments, and political convictions. Along the way, it sheds light on the complex relationship between art and society. Beginning with a fresh reading of Emerson s elusive philosophy, the author identifies the tension between Romanticism and Liberalism as a source of Modernist poetics. Critics have dissected the eccentric forms of avant-garde American poetry but have never adequately explained its scrupulous avoidance of abstraction and elimination of the poet from the poem. Drawing extensively on classic and contemporary theory, this book reveals postwar poetics, particularly the epics Paterson and The Maximus Poems, as the fulfillment of a longstanding Romantic social vision, one which seeks to invest Liberal social structures with a transcendental core. This book is a valuable source for scholars with an interest in Emerson and Pound Studies, the intellectual traditions leading to Modernism, and the Objectivist and Black Mountain schools of American poetry.

Generally regarded as modern Egypt s leading literary figure, Naguib Mahfouz was the first Arabic-language author awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. Critics hail Mahfouz for his ability to capture the essence of Cairene culture and life. This book illuminates how Naguib Mahfouz has successfully used the elements of daily life to capture the reality of his generation amidst the political upheaval caused in part by the British occupation of Egypt. This study also goes beyond opening up the Egyptian world to the reader; it is a careful analysis of the major novels of Mahfouz s career from an ambiguous feminist perspective. The author selects the term ambiguous deliberately to signify the disparity between a Western and Islamic lens. By employing this approach, the author successfully shows how the characters are not only entrapped in cages of subservience, but also cleverly reveals how the reader of Mahfouz s work is often entrapped in cages of misunderstanding. As the first scholarly study on Mahfouz s work through a highly original interdisciplinary Western and Eastern feminist lens, this book is a critical addition for collections in Literature, Middle Eastern Studies, and Women s Studies.

Philip Roth s standing on the literary scene is undisputed. The recipient of innumerable literary awards, the Jewish American author has reached past the precincts of his Newark s Weequahic neighborhood to become one of the most significant American novelists of the late twentieth century, an unrivalled master of the art of fiction. His literary output spanning more than 50 years and more than thirty books has been astounding both in terms of quantity and quality. Roth s place among the classics has been established by a host of critical studies presenting Roth s work from a myriad of thematic perspectives. Critical literature on Roth has become a minor industry of sorts and the interested reader may find a number of excellent general book-length treatments of his oeuvre. Starting with the front matter in The Human Stain (2000), Roth has rearranged the list of his previously published works, grouping them according to the narrating voice. The list of the Zuckerman Books is the most conspicuous in this rearrangement, and the only one that has been signaled by Roth as complete since the publication of Exit Ghost (2007) that has marked the demise of Nathan Zuckerman explicitly. The time appears ripe to narrow the scope of inquiry and engage critically with Roth s own rethinking of his work, starting from the character who has been recognized unanimously as the author s most beloved protagonist and his most recognizable alter-ego figure. This book provides a sustained analysis of the nine Zuckerman Books plus My Life as a Man (1974) and The Facts (1988) featuring Roth s most famous protagonist in ways crucial to assess his literary function across multiple narratives. This book traces Zuckerman s fictional birth in My Life as a Man and The Ghost Writer, his growth through Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson, The Prague Orgy, The Counterlife, The Facts, his development in American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain and his death in Exit Ghost, to explore how Roth has been progressively creating and refining this mask and his voice as a means to come to terms with his own biography, his history, and his own self as a writer. All the defining features of Roth s poetics masking practices, ventriloquism, meta-fictional focus, cultural significance are visible in the creation of Zuckerman as narrator. This study keeps up the ongoing reflection in Roth s scholarly literature on the foundational relationship between facts and fictions demonstrating how Zuckerman amplifies and perfects the typically Rothian tendency to draw materials for his fictional writing from his own life and reveals Roth s ambition to create a monument out of a specific and well individualized identity: the writer steeped in American history. As Roth s most cherished mask, Nathan Zuckerman opens for the reader interested in the Jewish American author a perfect window on the crucial issue of authorship and on the range of Roth s thematic preoccupations. In proposing to view The Ghost Writer as a narrative beginning, The Counterlife as a middle and Exit Ghost as an end, the book addresses the stakes at play in reading across multiple narratives directly: how is Zuckerman s identity shaped? How does narrative technique interact with biographical data? How do readers make (progressive) sense of Zuckerman and how do they cope with inconsistencies? What kind of coherence can be ascribed to Zuckerman in spite of the gaps his long narrative presents? What if anything is specifically Jewish about the creation of Zuckerman as narrator of numerous books? What are the literary functions, the formal and narratological underpinnings and the psychological needs Zuckerman activates and reveals? The book's groundbreaking contribution consists in a unique focus on the inner, that is to say, narratological logic of the fictional world presided over by Nathan Zuckerman and in the contextual attention to how form in its panoply of aspects triggers reader responses and activities. Masiero illuminates Roth s art of fiction through the detailed analysis of Roth s ambitious dream of creating a complete narrative microcosm. This book is important for the general reader interested in contemporary American fiction, as well as for teachers of American literature and Jewish studies, for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, and, of course for Roth scholars and literary theorists.

Contemporary Arab American Women Writers: Hyphenated Identities and Border Crossings is a profound study of how contemporary Arab American women writers who have been marginalized and silenced, especially after 9/11, are pointing out the racism, oppression, and marginalization they experience in the United States and are beginning to uncover the particularities of their own ethnic histories. The book focuses mainly on four works by contemporary Arab American women writers: A Border Passage (1999) by Leila Ahmed, Emails from Scheherazad by Mohja Khaf, West of the Jordan (2003) by Laila Halaby, and Crescent (2003) by Diana Abu-Jaber, examining how each of these works uniquely tackles the idea of having a hyphenated identity--an identity that has been complicated by living in a hostile environment and living in a borderzone. In this book, the author articulately examines how Leila Ahmed, Mohja Khaf, Laila Halaby, and Diana Abu Jaber explore what it means to belong to a nation as it wages war in their Arab homelands, supports the elimination of Palestine, and racializes Arab men as terrorists and Arab women as oppressed victims, while investigating the themes of exile, doubleness, split vision, and difference. Using postcolonial and feminist literary theories, the author insightfully investigates how these Arab American women writers critique intellectual tendencies that might be understood as making concessions to Western and Orientalist fundamentalist regimes and movements that in effect abandon Arab women to their iron rule.

John Banville is one of Ireland s greatest contemporary prose writers, widely known as the master of simile and metaphor. An artful explorer of the murky waters of memory, he is a relentless prober of the uncertainty of the human condition. In addition to a number of plays, and innumerable magazine and newspaper articles, Banville s sixteen novels have been enthusiastically received. In 2005, The Sea won the Man Booker Prize. Banville then went on to win the Franz Kafka Prize in 2011, the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Achievement in Irish Literature in 2013, and the Prince of Asturias Award, the sought-after Spanish literary prize, in 2014. There has been talk too about Banville being a possible candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature. It is thus not surprising that scholars have paid close attention to Banville s work since his debut in the 1970s. His writing about the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries presents a stirring and disturbing view of a world made opaque by deceptive appearances. Social philosopher Jean Baudrillard s ideas on simulation provide an interesting lens for examining Banville s work because Baudrillard has envisioned a universe perhaps even bleaker than Banville s in which men and women lose their bearings. To Baudrillard, men and women lose their bearings in a universe where nobody is representative of anything and where they risk becoming simulacra copies without originals or connection to their real selves. Reading Banville through Baudrillard elucidates Banville s universe of radical uncertainty. This study is the first to apply aspects of Jean Baudrillard s thinking on simulation to John Banville s work by tracing and analyzing instances of simulation in seven novels and two plays, which were published in 1997 2015, by Banville. The analysis sheds light on issues of duplicity, usurped identities, masks and masking, and the instability of self and reality. It shows how Banville s work is in dialogue with the Baudrillard s idea that simulation is an important mode of perception. There is a network of multiple and mutating connections which extend backward into the far reaches of past mythologies and forward into such realms of postmodernity as Baudrillard envisions in his descriptions of the third order of simulacra. Close readings of these texts by Banville reveal the presence of Baudrillard s ideas incorporated in them. These include a tendency for things to float, copies to replace originals, connections to the real to be distorted or absent, and in at least one novel the entire human world to be an artful copy of a lost or nonextant original. As for the self, Baudrillard seems to envision the self as a wholly operational molecule, spinning within an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference. Banville s narrating central characters, although tending to search for a unified self, are instead likely to find a vacancy at their core. Self emerges as an ignis fatuus a ghost light fanning its own illusions of self-determination. A sense of vertiginous proximity to an existential void is a compelling presence in Banville s texts and suggests that at their center, too, lies a vacancy, a void. This study also finds that in Banville s work, creative acts of transformation and renewal provide a means however fleeting for resisting and managing that void. By reading Banville through Baudrillard, we gain important insights into Banville s view of the human condition. Reading John Banville Through Jean Baudrillard is an important resource for scholars, teachers, and students in the fields of contemporary literature and Irish studies.