NEW BOOK: The Dark John McGahern – A Critical Edition

Edited by Anna Teekell, Ellen Scheible | Syracuse University Press

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

For more CLICK HERE.

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.