Issue Details: First known date: 2014... 2014 Laurie Clancy as Novelist of the Secular City
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'Laurie Clancy is very much a writer of the modern secular city. Although he was brought up in a Catholic household, he had left the Church well before he left school. The world he describes in his fiction is a post-modern world, where there is no God to offer comfort or authority to offer meaning. Clancy approaches this world from a realist perspective, but his realism breaks down as his characters find their efforts to make sense or to find fulfilment break down into fragmentary episodes of frustration or futility. Indeed he published many of these individual scenes as separate short stories. Even in the novels the narratives tend to collapse into series of fragments, rather than follow any kind of progression towards unity. These fragments record the frustrated attempts of his characters to create a unity in their experience, or to bend the outer world to their desires. Their constant failures produce an absurdity that ranges from the farcical to the tragic. ' (Author's introduction)

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  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon JASAL Man of Many Letters : Essays On Laurie Clancy And His Work vol. 14 no. 4 2014 8240672 2014 periodical issue 2014
Last amended 19 Jan 2017 10:16:19
http://nla.gov.au/nla.arc-63067-20150114-1144-www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/3120/4193.html Laurie Clancy as Novelist of the Secular Citysmall AustLit logo JASAL
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