Abstract
Patrick McCabe’s fiction has a complex relationship with literary predecessors and his work interacts in especially revealing ways with the writing of James Joyce. McCabe’s oeuvre demonstrates a sustained engagement with Joyce in the way that it adapts a number of Joycean frameworks, methods, and motifs. In Flann O’Brien’s final novel, The Dalkey Archive (1964), Joyce is discovered serving behind the bar of a pub in Skerries, Co. Dublin, with no apparent knowledge that Ulysses has taken the literary world by storm. Following a comparative discussion of various contemporary Irish writers’ reactions to Joyce, this essay will argue that the encounters with Joyce to be observed in McCabe’s writing can be seen as striking a similarly knowing and playful position to O’Brien’s regarding Joycean influence, as well as being placed productively in a counter-revivalist tradition that takes cues from Joyce’s commitment to unsettling totalizing narratives of Irish national identity.1
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McWilliams, E. (2015). Adaptations of Joyce in the Fiction of Patrick McCabe. In: Carpentier, M.C. (eds) Joycean Legacies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137503626_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137503626_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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