George Moore: Artistic Visions and Literary Worlds
Editor: Mary Pierse
Date Of Publication: Sep 2006
Isbn13: 9781847180292
Isbn: 1-84718-029-9
The Irish writer George Moore (1852-1933) was a very significant and often controversial figure on the literary stages of Paris, London and Dublin at a key cultural moment. Between 1880 and 1931, his creative involvements included spells with literary theatres in London and Dublin, jousts with the daring and repression of the fin de siècle, and a hail-and-farewell to Yeats and the Irish Revival. This collection of essays offers fresh insights into diverse elements of his œuvre and reflects some of the wide variety in Moore’s literary innovations, influences and legacy. Contributors note his pioneering contributions to the short story, his penetrating insights into Greek classical literature, his avant-garde feminism and egalitarianism, and – what may surprise 21st-century readers of biblical-theme blockbusters - his sensitive but contentious novelistic treatment of the historical Jesus.

In this volume, there are studies of sophisticated composition, and fresh approaches to textual analysis. The multiple Moore talents are scrutinised, myths are dispelled and new evidence is uncovered for historic linkages. George Moore’s anticipation of Freudian psychological insights and his engagement with Darwinian theses are but two of his close involvements with key nineteenth-century figures. Manet, Degas, Parnell, Kant, Maupassant, Gladstone, Zola, Marx and Woolf must feature on the list of names that are inseparable from Moore’s life and work. Yeats and Joyce also loom large and their under-acknowledged indebtedness to Moore poses difficult questions for literary history. While Moore’s own debt to French artistic influences, English models, and Irish heritage has long been recognised, perceptions of Moore’s writing from outside the Anglophone world highlight issues that demand further consideration. This multi-faceted author is well-served by these new studies that, in turn, suggest additional avenues yet to be explored.

Mary Pierse has taught 17th and 18th-century poetry and late 19th-century prose in the Department of English, UCC, Cork where she is IRCHSS Government of Ireland Post-Doctoral Research Fellow (2004-2006). Organiser of the first international and tri-lingual Moore conference in 2005, her current research is focused on Literary Impressionism and gender depiction in Moore’s novels. Publications include articles on the art, landscapes, literary complexity and European connections of George Moore, and on the poetry of Cathal Ó Searcaigh and Dennis O’Driscoll.

"The dust jacket ... announces that the volumes eighteen essays ... offer 'fresh insights into diverse elements' of Moore's oeuvre and reflect the wide variety of his 'literary innovations, influences and legacy.' Readers will not be disappointed: here is MOore in all shapes and guises - from autobiographer to Voltairian - through the lenses of Irish, English, American, French, Spanish, Brazilian, and Greek scholars."

From a review in English Literature in Transition

"This volume is a most welcome and timely reassessment of George Moore’s significance in Irish and world literature, of his sense of innovation, his modernism, his significance to James Joyce, his artistic role. The variety of the theoretical approaches, of the national backgrounds of the authors, their emphasis on Moore’s significance in their own countries all contribute to the interest of this book.

This is an excellent analysis of the significance of what Deleuze and Gattari call 'minority literature', i. e. 'the literature of a minority written in the language of the majority, a literature in which compulsive expression of revolutionary sentiment cannot be avoided by its author'.

Moore is rendered visible in his working and reworking of the written text and the process through which textual grammar reveals psychic grammar is made explicit."

Professor J. Brihault

"Mary Pierse argues for a lasting sympathy between Moore and his reforming landowner father in her essay on politics. If this erases the late-century textures of the younger Moore's advanced beliefs, it also refigures teh cultural geography of post-Famine Ireland, Pierse preparing the reader for Moore's reading of Dalkey as a modern-day Babylon, the decaying villas of the mortgaged aristocracy hanging like faded gardens from the Dublin coast. Perceptively, Pierse sets Thomas hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles against Moore's Esther Waters...

Manet's early portrait, 'George Moore au Cafe', outlines a writer and thinker in development, the wide cuffs and loose collar opening on to a career to which Moore looks across the table, attentively disputatious. George Moore: Artistic Visions and Literary Worlds is an engaging portrait of this figure in literary perspective"

-Nicholas Allen, Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in The Irish Times Weekend Review, Saturday, June 30, 2007

Price Uk Gbp: 39.99
Price Us Usd: 59.99

Sample pdf (including Table of Contents)