| 1. |
- Duncan, Rebecca, et al.
(author)
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Introduction : McGrath in the World: Gothic, Madness and Transnational Consciousness
- 2019
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In: Patrick McGrath and his Worlds. - London : Routledge. - 9781138311190 - 9781003007944 ; , s. 1-18
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This introduction identifies a transnational consciousness that runs through Patrick McGrath’s work. Locating this in relation to the author’s own migration from England to the United States, and considering it in the context of late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century transatlantic upheavals, the chapter explores McGrath’s established and related investments in the gothic and tropes of madness as registering and, at times, interrogating contemporary geopolitical shifts. To bring this relationship between madness, gothic, and the transnational into focus, the introduction examines a selection of fictions from across McGrath’s oeuvre through the lens of the imperial gothic—a mode that is frequently reflexively and critically engaged by these texts. Viewed in this way, McGrath’s gothic figurations of madness can—in certain of his narratives—be read to witness anxieties around the decline of British and US hegemony in the latter phases of the Cold War, for example, and in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. To approach the author’s fiction from this vantage point is not, as we point out, to refuse the psychoanalytic perspectives so frequently applied to the McGrath canon; rather, it is to make visible the ways in which self-consciously summoned clinical paradigms articulate with gothic forms and a transnational sensibility to critique planetary formations of power. The introduction closes with an outline of the chapters collected in this volume.
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| 2. |
- Foley, Matt, et al.
(author)
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Patrick McGrath and Passion : the Gothic modernism of Asylum and Beyond
- 2020
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In: Patrick McGrath and his Worlds. - London : Routledge. - 9781138311190 - 9781003007944 ; , s. 103-115
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This chapter reads Asylum (1996) and Port Mungo (2004) to suggest the centrality of passion to McGrath’s writing and, more specifically, to argue for the importance of modernist aesthetics and influences to mediating and locating these representations. There is still much to be said about the complex influences that modernism has on McGrath’s signature first-person narration and regarding the ways in which his fiction explores and critiques modernist concerns. As a starting point for further investigations, our argument makes the case that some of McGrath’s work can be understood as “gothic modernist:” that is, as drawing together modernist technique and concerns with images of gothic excess. Important intertexts for McGrath include first-person modes of narration drawn from modernism, for example from Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Solder: a Tale of Passion (1914), as well the “primtivist” turn to modernist aesthetics, evident in the writing of D. H. Lawrence, and in the post-Impressionist paintings of Paul Gauguin.
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