This collection of essays creates a richly textured and illuminating portrait of Walter Macken’s literary and cultural achievements. Together these essays present a comprehensive and authoritative study, ranging from his earliest Irish-language work for the theatre to the posthumous film adaptation of his well-loved English-language children’s novel, The Flight of the Doves. The scholarship is consistently rigorous. The essays combine skilful use of the Macken archives in Galway and Wuppertal with elegant close readings and theoretically-informed analysis. Some of the best analysis here illuminates Macken’s distinctive contribution to Irish culture, while also enriching and complicating our understanding of Irish literary history – and in particular our understanding of the significance of forms and genres, such as the historical novel, the short story and children’s writing. Overall, Macken emerges as not just artistically dynamic, but also as a figure with complex, sometimes contradictory, political/intellectual commitments and historical perspectives. As such, in this collection he stands as a figure who deepens and complicates our view of mid-twentieth-century Ireland. The study will reposition Macken’s work within Irish literary studies, and provide fruitful coordinates for future work in the field. At the same time, the essays are well-written and accessible to a wider readership; they will bring familiar readers back to his work, and prompt new readers to seek it out.
Michael Cronin, Department of English, Maynooth University
This book by Sandra Heinen and Katharina Rehhak offers an eclectic and valuable collection of 12 essays on Macken as well as a concluding interview with Walter Macken’s two sons, Ultan and Walter. It is a book that is long overdue and is hugely to be welcomed. Heinen and Renhak are established scholars based at the University of Wuppertal (where, since the mid 1980s, Walter Macken’s archive of papers has been located), and in this helpful collection they assemble essays from Irish and continental European critics in order to examine some of the different aspects of Macken’s multi-faceted career. What emerges is a complex picture of novels and plays that while written within an overarching naturalism redefines nationalism in terms of Irish Christian pacifism and at the same time problematizes the intersections between gender and history. Overall the essays in this collection establish the importance of Walter Macken for Irish cultural and literary and theatre history, as well as draw much-needed attention to the wealth of archival material on Macken available at the University of Wuppertal library.
Lionel Pilkington, Professor of English, National University of Ireland, Galway
