Barry McCrea
In the Company of Strangers
The first paragraph in the Introduction is about a family memory which prompted the book in the first place.
On page 11 I discuss fairytales looking at the problem of maturation and development without the promise of reproduction.
I am proudest, as far as literary analysis goes, of the Proust chapter.
What I most hope for as an outcome for the book is that readers will come away first with a deeper understanding and appreciation of Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce and Proust, but also questioning forms of narrative we take for granted as standard, and think about other ways we can make sense of time and of lives, other ways in which we can narrate the world.
Editor: Erind Pajo
In the Company of Strangers
Barry McCrea In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust Columbia University Press 280 pages, 6 x 9 inches ISBN 978 0231157636
Available here →October 10, 2011
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Jerry Bauer
Barry McCrea
Barry McCrea is from Dublin, Ireland. After a B.A. in Spanish and French at Trinity College, Dublin, he moved to the United States to do a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Princeton. He is currently associate professor of Comparative Literature at Yale. Besides In the Company of Strangers (Columbia, 2011), Barry McCrea is the author of novel, The First Verse (Carroll & Graf, 2005) and Minor Languages and the Modernist Literary Imagination (forthcoming from Yale in 2012).
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In Dickens the family almost always wins, in Joyce and Proust the stranger wins.
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