BOOKS
Elke D'hoker, Leerlingen en literatuur. Hoe vaardige lezers vormen (Lannoo, 2023)
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This is a textbook for teachers who want to use literature in their language classrooms, both for mother tongue and foreign language education.
As young people read less and less books and their scores for reading comprehension is decreasing significantly (see PISA results), it is vital to place literary texts (in the widest possible sense) back at the heart of language teaching. This textbook explains why and how. For more information, see the publisher's website |
Alex Beaumont and Elke D'hoker (eds), Sarah Hall. Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2023)
Sarah Hall’s fame as a writer has been rising steadily since her debut novel, Haweswater, appeared in 2002. With each succeeding novel she has broken new ground and captivated new audiences, and her fifth, The Wolf Border, received international acclaim. The essays in this collection – the first book-length study of Hall’s work to be made available to academic and non-academic readers – bear witness to her originality and versatility. They situate Hall’s work within wider intellectual and literary traditions, British and international contexts, and offer an essential guide to an essential writer.
The collection came out of a conference on Sarah Hall I organised in May 2018 in Leuven.
The collection came out of a conference on Sarah Hall I organised in May 2018 in Leuven.
Phyllis Boumans, Elke D'hoker, and Declan Meade, The Writer's Torch. Reading Stories from The Bell. (The Stinging Fly, 2023)
This book contains 18 stories from the iconic Dublin magazine, The Bell (1940-1954) with responses from as many contemporary Irish authors. The book was launched on 1 February in Dublin's Museum of Modern Literature (MoLI) and has already been reviewed in The Irish Times, The Sunday Times, The Irish Examiner and The Irish Independent. Elke D'hoker and contributor Anne Enright talked about the book with Sean Rocks on RTE Radio1's Arena.
Elke D'hoker, Ethel Colburn Mayne: Selected Stories (EER, 2021)
This is the first book devoted to the Irish writer, Ethel Colburn Mayne (1865-1941), who made her debut with some stories in The Yellow Book and went on to build a versatile and prolific literary career. Her stories and novels often depict the restricted lives of girls and women in late-nineteenth-century Ireland, but they also stand out because of their wit, perspicacity and irony. It is for her short stories that she received the greatest acclaim, often being compared to Henry James and Katherine Mansfield. This book introduces Mayne's life and work and offers a selection of her stories, drawn from all six of her original collections.
see publisher's website |
Elke D'hoker and Chris Mourant (eds), The Modern Short Story and Magazine Culture, 1880-1950 (EUP, 2021)
This collection of original essays highlights the intertwined fates of the modern short story and periodical culture in the period 1880–1950, the heyday of magazine short fiction in Britain. Through case studies that focus on particular magazines, short stories and authors, chapters investigate the presence, status and functioning of short stories within a variety of periodical publications – highbrow and popular, mainstream and specialised, middlebrow and avant-garde. Examining the impact of social and publishing networks on the production, dissemination and reception of short stories, it foregrounds the ways in which magazines and periodicals shaped conversations about the short story form and prompted or provoked writers into developing the genre.
see website |
Elke D'hoker, Irish Women Writers and the Modern Short Story (Palgrave, 2016)
This book traces the development of the modern short story in the hands of Irish women writers from the 1890s to the present. George Egerton, Somerville and Ross, Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Lavin, Edna O’Brien, Anne Enright and Claire Keegan are only some of the many Irish women writers who have made lasting contributions to the genre of the modern short story - yet their achievements have often been marginalized in literary histories, which typically define the Irish short story in terms of its oral heritage, nationalist concerns, rural realism and outsider-hero. Through a detailed investigation of the short fiction of fifteen prominent writers, this study aims to open up this critical conceptualization of the Irish short story to the formal properties and thematic concerns women writers bring to the genre. What stands out in thematic terms is an abiding interest in human relations, whether of love, the family or the larger community. In formal terms, this book traces the overall development of the Irish short story, highlighting both the lines of influence that connect these writers and the specific use each individual author makes of the short story form.
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Elke D'hoker and Stephanie Eggermont (eds), The Irish Short Story. Traditions and Trends (2015)
Often hailed as a ‘national genre’, the short story has a long and distinguished tradition in Ireland and continues to fascinate readers and writers alike. Critical appreciation of the Irish short story, however, has laboured for too long under the normative conception of it as a realist form, used to depict quintessential truths about Ireland and Irish identity. This definition fails to do justice to the richness and variety of short stories published in Ireland since the 1850s. This collection aims to open up the critical debate on the Irish short story to the many different concerns, influences and innovations by which it has been formed. The essays gathered here consider the diverse national and international influences on the Irish short story and investigate its genealogy. They recover the short fiction of writers neglected in previous literary histories and highlight unexpected strands in the work of established writers. They scrutinize established traditions and use cutting-edge critical frameworks to discern new trends. Taken together, the essays contribute to a more encompassing and enabling view of the Irish short story as a hybrid, multivalent and highly flexible literary form, which is forever being reshaped to meet new insights, new influences and new realities.
(see Publisher's website)
(see Publisher's website)
Elke D'hoker, Visions of Alterity: Representation in the Works of John Banville (2004)
Visions of Alterity: Representation in the Works of John Banville offers detailed and original readings of the work of the Irish author John Banville, one of the foremost figures in contemporary European literature. It investigates one of the fundamental concerns of Banville’s novels: mediating the gap between subject and object or self and world in representation. By drawing on the rich history of the problem of representation in literature, philosophy and literary theory, this study provides a thorough insight into the rich philosophical and intertextual dimension of Banville’s fiction. In close textual analyses of Banville’s most important novels, it maps out a thematic development that moves from an interest in the epistemological and aesthetic representation of the world in scientific theories, over a concern with the ethical dimension of representations, to an exploration of self-representation and identity. What remains constant throughout these different perspectives is the disruption of representations by brief but haunting glimpses of otherness. In tracing these different visions of alterity in Banville’s solipsistic literary world, this study offers a better understanding of his insistent and thought-provoking exploration of what it means to be human.
Elke D'hoker (ed.) Mary Lavin (2013)
Ever since the publication of her first collection, Tales from Bective Bridge, in 1942, Mary Lavin has been praised for admirably capturing the social and psychological reality of mid-twentieth-century Ireland, in intense and lucid stories. Yet Lavin’s sharp insight into the quiet tragedies and joys of human life easily transcends its immediate context, and her work continues to appeal to contemporary readers, both in Ireland and abroad.
To celebrate the centenary of Mary Lavin’s birth, this collection honours one of the leading figures of the Irish short story tradition. Leading criticss examine the main themes and stylistic features of Lavin’s novels and short stories from a variety of perspectives, including gender, sexuality, family and community.
Lavin’s work is presented here in its literary, historical and biographical context, drawing attention to Lavin’s indebtedness to modernism, her engagement with popular culture and the influence of her early American experience. While some writers offer new insights into such famous stories as ‘In a Cafe’ or ‘The Becker Wives’, others bring to light largely neglected gems such as ‘The Yellow Beret’ or ‘The Small Bequest’. There is also engagement with new archival material, including Lavin’s correspondence with her New Yorker editors and private letters.
For coverage of the book in the media, see the pieces on writing.ie and reviews in The Sunday Times, and The Irish Times
To celebrate the centenary of Mary Lavin’s birth, this collection honours one of the leading figures of the Irish short story tradition. Leading criticss examine the main themes and stylistic features of Lavin’s novels and short stories from a variety of perspectives, including gender, sexuality, family and community.
Lavin’s work is presented here in its literary, historical and biographical context, drawing attention to Lavin’s indebtedness to modernism, her engagement with popular culture and the influence of her early American experience. While some writers offer new insights into such famous stories as ‘In a Cafe’ or ‘The Becker Wives’, others bring to light largely neglected gems such as ‘The Yellow Beret’ or ‘The Small Bequest’. There is also engagement with new archival material, including Lavin’s correspondence with her New Yorker editors and private letters.
For coverage of the book in the media, see the pieces on writing.ie and reviews in The Sunday Times, and The Irish Times
Elke D'hoker, Raphaël Ingelbien and Hedwig Schwall (eds), Irish Women Writers: New Critical Perspectives (2011)
After a decade in which women writers have gradually been given more recognition in the study of Irish literature, this collection proposes a reappraisal of Irish women’s writing by inviting dialogues with new or hitherto marginalised critical frameworks as well as with foreign and transnational literary traditions. Several essays explore how Irish women writers engaged with European themes and traditions through the genres of travel writing, the historical novel, the monologue and the fairy tale. Other contributions are concerned with the British context in which some texts were published and argue for the existence of Irish inflections of phenomena such as the New Woman, suffragism or vegetarianism. Further chapters emphasise the transnational character of Irish women’s writing by applying continental theory and French feminist thinking to various texts; in other chapters new developments in theory are applied to Irish texts for the first time. Casting the efforts of Irish women in a new light, the collection also includes explorations of the work of neglected or emerging authors who have remained comparatively ignored by Irish literary criticism.
Elke D'hoker and Gunther Martens (eds), Narrative Unreliability in the Twentieth-Century First-Person Novel
This volume deals with the occurrence and development of unreliable first-person narration in twentieth century Western literature. The different articles in this collection approach this topic both from the angle of literary theory and through a detailed reading of literary texts. By addressing questions concerning the functions, characteristics and types of unreliability, this collection contributes to the current theoretical debate about unreliable narration. At the same time, the collection highlights the different uses to which unreliability has been put in different contexts, poetical traditions and literary movements. It does so by tracing the unreliable first-person narrator in a variety of texts from Dutch, German, American, British, French, Italian, Polish, Danish and Argentinean literature. In this way, this volume significantly extends the traditional ‘canon’ of narrative unreliability. This collection combines essays from some of the foremost theoreticians of unreliability (James Phelan, Ansgar Nünning) with essays from experts in different national traditions. The result is a collection that approaches the ‘case’ of narrative unreliability from a new and more varied perspective.