William Trevor: Revaluations

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Born in Ireland in 1928, resident in Britain since 1953, an artist whose work embraces, but transcends these cultures, William Trevor is one of the most significant, popular prose writers working today. The event will initially examine Trevor’s schooling in the art of fiction, tracing the influence of past masters (Dickens, Turgenev and Joyce), and more recent exemplars (Camus, Beckett, Pinter). In evaluating Trevor’s own achievements, speakers will highlight his continuing responsiveness to historical and cultural change, how frequently his characters’ choices are constrained not only by ‘nationality, language, religion’, but also as a consequence of class, education, gender and race.

Chairs:
Professor Michael Parker (University of Central Lancashire)
Dr Paul Delaney (Trinity College Dublin)

Speakers:
Dame Hermione Lee DBE, FRSL, FBA (University of Oxford)
Professor Lyn Innes (University of Kent)
Professor Michael O’Neill (Durham University)

About the participants:

Paul Delaney is Lecturer in Irish Writing at Trinity College, Dublin. His publications include the edited collection Reading Colm Tóibín (Liffey Press, 2008), and essays and chapters on Daniel Corkery, Seán O’Faoláin, Frank O’Connor, Elizabeth Bowen and Mary Lavin. His next book on Seán O’Faoláin will appear from Irish Academic Press.

Lyn Innes is Emeritus Professor of Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent. Her publications include Chinua Achebe (1990), Woman and Nation in Irish Literature and Society (1993), A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain (2008) and The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English (2007).

Hermione Lee is Professor of English at Oxford University, and a frequent reviewer and broadcaster. The author of acclaimed books on Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Bowen and Willa Cather, she holds Fellowships from the RSL and British Academy, and received a DBE for Services to Literary Scholarship in 2013.

Michael O’Neill is Professor of English at Durham University and a distinguished poet. Recent books include The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry (2007), Romantic Poetry (co-ed. Charles Mahoney, 2007), Wheel (Arc, 2008), and The Cambridge History of English Poetry (2010).

Michael Parker is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Central Lancashire, whose books include Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet (1993), Northern Irish Literature 1956-2006 (2007) and Irish Literature Since 1990 (2009). His and Paul Delaney’s co-edited collection, William Trevor: Revaluations, is to be published by Manchester University Press in September 2013.