"This critical edition of John McGahern’s controversial second novel, The Dark, is both timely and welcome. It provides an updated American edition of the work, complete with a very helpful and informative introduction by the editors, good explanatory notes, and essays by four eminent scholars."—Eamon Maher, coeditor of Essays on John McGahern: Assessing a Literary Legacy
"Original and very much needed, given the relevance of this novel in the Irish literary canon."—Marisol Morales-Ladrón, coeditor of Deirdre Madden: New Critical Essays
"This timely new edition . . . equips educators and students to understand, discuss, and address those forms of abuse that flourish under conditions of silence."—Margot Gayle Backus, coeditor of The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable
Description
Bringing John McGahern’s 1965 masterpiece back into print in the United States after years of inaccessibility, this new sixtieth-anniversary critical edition includes an introduction aimed at first-time readers, explanatory footnotes, McGahern’s own glossary, and four scholarly essays aimed at guiding readers through the novel’s famously controversial history. While the text was initially banned in Ireland for obscenity, this edition demonstrates that McGahern’s novel of adolescence is not obscene, but revelatory, exposing the corruption underlying authority structures in mid-century Ireland—from the family to the church, to the government’s willingness to ignore national and communal trauma. The Dark follows a promising young boy’s struggles to break free from the economic and social forces trapping him in a lifestyle that is both familiar and suffocating. At the heart of the novel is the boy’s complex and stormy relationship with his abusive, widowed father, who is left to raise a family with little outside aid. The Dark is a story of alarming brutality, surprising tenderness, and poetic lyricism; a reflection of Irish society that maintains historical significance as contemporary Ireland continues to build its national identity.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Seeing in the Dark
Anna Teekell
The Dark
John McGahern
Essays
1. “The Four-Letter Word”: Censorship and “The Dark”
Frank Shovlin
2. Documenting The Dark: John McGahern and the Archive
Barry Houlihan
3. A Very Special Violence: John McGahern’s Biopolitical Novel
Enda Duffy
4. Reading Trauma in The Dark
Kathleen Costello-Sullivan
About the Author
Anna Teekell is associate professor of English at Christopher Newport University.
Ellen Scheible is professor of English and director of the honors program at Bridgewater State University.
Related Interest
May 2025