John Banville offers a close analysis of most of Banville’s major novels, his Quirke crime novels, and his dramatic adaptations of Heinrich von Kleist’s plays. Banville’s work has been marked by an embedded discourse about the significance of art and by a concurrent self-consciousness of its own status as art. His novels perpetually reveal an overt fascination with the visual arts, in particular, and with the aesthetic principle of literature as art. This study asserts that, as a whole, Banville’s work presents an elaborate and richly textured coded account of his relationship with art and with the self-referential fictional world that his novels conjure. It is from this critical context that John Banville’s central argument is derived: that his fiction can be viewed as an extended interrogation of the meaning and status of art and that it is itself representative of the type of art admired in the pages of the novels.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.