John Banville offers a close analysis of most of Banville’s major novels, his Quirke crime novels, and his dramatic adaptations of Heinrich von Kleist’s plays. It asserts that Banville’s fiction can be viewed both as an extended interrogation of the meaning and status of art, and that it is itself representative of the type of art admired in the pages of the novels.

NEIL MURPHY is a professor of English at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He is the editor of Aidan Higgins: The Fragility of Form and coeditor (with Keith Hopper) of The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien and (with W. Michelle Wang and Cheryl Julia Lee) of the Routledge Companion to Literature and Art.

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction

1. The Early Evolution of an Aesthetic: From Long Lankin to Mefisto

2. The Frames Trilogy: The Book of Evidence, Ghosts, and Athena

3. Brush-Strokes of Memory: The Sea

4. The Art of Self-Reflexivity: The Cleave Novels

5. John Banville and Heinrich von Kleist—The Art of Confusion: The Broken Jug, God’s Gift, Love in the Wars, and The Infinities

6. Art and Crime: Benjamin Black’s Quirke Novels

Conclusion
Bibliography
Index