Neil Jordan, Author and Screenwriter: The Imagination of Transgression

Neil Jordan is immediately associated with the successful films he has directed (The Crying Game, Interview with the Vampire, Michael Collins...). And yet, he is also a man of letters. His literary work, composed of eight novels and a collection of short stories, is rich, dense and complex. It shows an interest in Irish history and politics, but also in the supernatural and the irrational. It creates a universe where time and space can abolish themselves, the material and the spiritual merge, the visible and invisible interpenetrate. Jordan’s fiction also transgresses the borders in more than one way. Both realistic and fantastic, it establishes numerous connections with psychoanalysis, Christian religion, mythology or cultural tradition, and revisits them in an original way. The present study approaches Neil Jordan’s literary work in all its diversity. It focuses primarily on the novelist, but also on the short story writer and the screenwriter, as his film making cannot be ignored. This book, devoted to the writer, aims to do justice to a major figure in contemporary Irish cultural life, whose artistic creation remains largely unexplored.