Abstract

This study examines the fictional strategies devised by John McGahern in order to give literary form to the experience of living in a changing society. He transcends the materiality of history by transforming it through myth and ritual, the myth of an ideal, lost world of social harmony, in which a classical unity of representation and expression was possible. These strategies are most closely observed in relation to his writing on the most powerful institutions in traditional Ireland: the Catholic church and the family.