The foreword is a literary comment to Brendan Kennelly's two novels contained in the volume: The Crooked Cross (1963) and The Florentines (1967). Kennelly draws extensively from classic and Irish epic and Joyce himself enters his work. In The Crooked Cross we can hear the echo of the classic Odyssey on the one hand and detect the prevailing mode of the tale of traditional Irish epic on the other. Emigration is an underlying theme in both novels though in The Florentines it is just temporarily experienced by the protagonist while coming of age. The Florentines, which represents an early and very original example of the campus novel tradition, belongs to the bildungsroman genre and its central theme is encounter: with England, English university life, English language.
Bendelli, G., Classic-Irish Odysseys, in Giuliana Bendell, G. B. (ed.), The Young are Desperate, Farmar, Dublin, Ireland 2012: 5- 12 [http://hdl.handle.net/10807/79404]
Classic-Irish Odysseys
Bendelli, Giuliana
2012
Abstract
The foreword is a literary comment to Brendan Kennelly's two novels contained in the volume: The Crooked Cross (1963) and The Florentines (1967). Kennelly draws extensively from classic and Irish epic and Joyce himself enters his work. In The Crooked Cross we can hear the echo of the classic Odyssey on the one hand and detect the prevailing mode of the tale of traditional Irish epic on the other. Emigration is an underlying theme in both novels though in The Florentines it is just temporarily experienced by the protagonist while coming of age. The Florentines, which represents an early and very original example of the campus novel tradition, belongs to the bildungsroman genre and its central theme is encounter: with England, English university life, English language.
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