Article: Reading John McGahern's The Barracks Through Yeats's "Down by the Salley Gardens".(Critical essay)

The sickness and subsequent death of Elizabeth Reegan, the protagonist of Irish novelist's John McGahern's The Barracks (London: Faber, 1983 paper ed. of 1963 First Edition) can be more easily understood through a realization of the Yeatsian intertext. McGahern's fictional landscape is modeled closely on his native County Roscommon and adopted home of County Leitrim in the northwest Irish midlands, not far from Yeats's Sligo. The theme of futile striving given in Yeats's early poem, "Down by the Salley Gardens" from Crossways (1889), has been adopted by McGahern in this novel that celebrates the rhythms of rural Ireland even as it shows the bone-crushing tasks of domestic ...

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