Bernard MacLaverty: New Critical Readings

Richard Rankin Russell is Professor of English at Baylor University, USA. His previous publications include Poetry and Peace: Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, and Northern Ireland (2010) and Martin McDonagh: A Casebook (2007).

• Foreword, Glenn Patterson \ Introduction, Richard Rankin Russell \ 1. “‘Made-Up Truths’: Themes,Tropes, and Narrative Technique in Bernard MacLaverty’s Early Short Stories,” Michael Parker \ 2. “Parabolic Plots in MacLaverty’s Lamb,” Richard Rankin Russell \ 3. “‘Join us’: Musical Style and Identity in ‘My Dear Palestrina,’” Gerry Smyth \ 4. “‘That orange and green dilemma’: Violence and the Traumatised Subject in Bernard MacLaverty’s Screenplays of Cal (1983) and Lamb (1985),” Richard Mills \ 5. “Character and Construction in Bernard MacLaverty’s Troubles Stories: The Great Profundo and Walking the Dog,” Richard Haslam, \ 6. “MacLaverty’s Holocaust: Affect, Memory, and the ‘Troubles,’” Stephen Watt \ 7. “The Personal is Political: Bernard MacLaverty’s Grace Notes as a Peace Process Novel,” Marilynn Richtarik \ 8. “‘Moving from one element to another’: Body and Soul in Bernard MacLaverty’s The Anatomy School,” Michael Rawl \ 9. “Bernard MacLaverty’s Fictional Geographies,” Neal Alexander \ 10. “Ireland and Elsewhere: The ‘Non-Irish’ in Bernard MacLaverty’s Fiction,” Laura Pelaschiar \ Afterword: “Looking at Art in Bernard MacLaverty’s Fiction,” David Holdeman \ Further Reading \ Index.

Rankin Russell’s ‘Parabolic Plots in Bernard MacLaverty’s Lamb’ (pp. 27–44) repurposes and explores the parables of the Good Samaritan and the lost sheep. Previous criticism on Lamb has presented it as a critique of religion and Catholicism. Rankin Russell offers an alternative approach, suggesting that it is Lamb’s misreading and neglect of illustrative parables that leads to his degeneration. As such, Rankin Russell suggests that Lamb, and MacLaverty’s fiction more broadly, has an ethical imperative—demanding that readers take moral responsibility for their actions and development.