Background
He grew up in Dalkey, County Dublin, and was educated at the Jesuit Gonzaga College, and Trinity College, Dublin (1993–1997) where he studied French and Spanish literature.
( In the Company of Strangers shows how a reconception of...)
In the Company of Strangers shows how a reconception of family and kinship underlies the revolutionary experiments of the modernist novel. While stories of marriage and long-lost relatives were a mainstay of classic Victorian fiction, Barry McCrea suggests that rival countercurrents within these family plots set the stage for the formal innovations of Joyce and Proust. Tracing the challenges to the family plot mounted by figures such as Fagin, Sherlock Holmes, Leopold Bloom, and Charles Swann, McCrea tells the story of how bonds generated by chance encounters between strangers come to take over the role of organizing narrative time and give shape to fictional worlds―a task and power that was once the preserve of the genealogical family. By investigating how the question of family is a hidden key to modernist structure and style, In the Company of Strangers explores the formal narrative potential of queerness and in doing so rewrites the history of the modern novel.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0231157630/?tag=2022091-20
( This memorable debut novel explores Dublin’s every corn...)
This memorable debut novel explores Dublin’s every corner, including a first-of-its-kind portrayal of its thriving gay nightlife, through the eyes of a young man seduced by a secret society’s ancient reading rituals, based on the sortes virgilianae. In brilliant prose, author Barry McCrea gives readers a psychologically gripping tale set within the intertwining worlds of literature and the living. When freshman Niall Lenihan moves to Trinity College, he dives into unfamiliar social scenes, quickly becoming fascinated by a reclusive pair of students—literary “mystics” who let signs and symbols from books determine their actions. Reluctantly, they admit him to their private sessions, and what begins as an intriguing game for Niall becomes increasingly esoteric, dramatic, and addictive. As Niall discovers the true nature of the pursuits in which he has become entangled, The First Verse traces a young man’s search for identity, companionship, and a cult’s shadowy origins in the pages of literature and the people of a city. Fans of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History or Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley will be mesmerized by the strange, page-turning world of this astonishing first novel from a dazzling new literary voice.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0786715138/?tag=2022091-20
( In the first decades of the twentieth century, rural po...)
In the first decades of the twentieth century, rural populations throughout Europe changed the language they used in everyday life, abandoning their traditional vernaculars—such as French patois, local Italian dialects, and the Irish language—in favor of major metropolitan languages such as French, Italian, and English. . In this book, Barry McCrea argues that the sudden linguistic homogenization of the European countryside was a key impulse in the development of literary modernism. The decline of rural vernaculars caused these languages to become the objects of powerful longings and projections. Seán Ó Ríordáin in Ireland and Pier Paolo Pasolini in Italy reshaped minor languages for use as private idioms of poetry; the revivalist idealization of Irish as a lost utopian language deeply affected the work of James Joyce; the disappearing dialects of northern France seemed to Marcel Proust to offer an escape from time itself. Drawing on a broad range of linguistic and cultural examples to present a major reevaluation of the sources and meanings of European literary modernism, Barry McCrea shows how metropolitan literary culture was fundamentally shaped by the vanishing vernaculars of the European countryside.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300185154/?tag=2022091-20
He grew up in Dalkey, County Dublin, and was educated at the Jesuit Gonzaga College, and Trinity College, Dublin (1993–1997) where he studied French and Spanish literature.
Princeton University.
He received a Doctor of Philosophy from Princeton University in 2004. He taught Comparative Literature at Yale University, where he was appointed full professor in 2012. He is currently professor of literature at the University of Notre Dame.
His novel The First Verse was published by Carroll & Graf in 2005.
The plot explores the concept of the Sortes Virgilianae. The First Verse was published in Spanish as Literati (DestinoLibro, 2006) and in German as Die Poeten der Nacht (Aufbau, 2008).
( In the first decades of the twentieth century, rural po...)
( This memorable debut novel explores Dublin’s every corn...)
( In the Company of Strangers shows how a reconception of...)