OBRASCI GRAĐENjA KNjIŽEVNIH (ANTI)JUNAKA U PROZI VILIJAMA TREVORA NA PRIMERU ROMANA „FELISIJINO PUTOVANjE“

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the patterns of building literary (anti)heroes in the prose of William Trevor based on the novel Felicia’s Journey (1994). As a standard-bearer of new realism in the contemporary Irish and British literature, William Trevor writes novels, novellas, and short stories with humanised characters, which he builds using the mimetic literary method, shapes by psychological descrip- tion, and evaluates according to the criteria of believability. As a Protestant in the Catholic Ireland, an Irishman in England and a countryman in London, the author forges his characters on the front line of the archetypal battle between the good and the evil in man and nature, Ireland and England, the country and the city, the old- world religiousness and the new-world loss of faith. The startling plight of all Trevor’s antiheroes (marginalised, atomised and alienated) initiates their introspective evalu- ation until the cathartic self-awareness is achieved through personal epiphany. The most striking character transformations occur on life’s by-paths which irreversibly lead from virtue to sin, from innocence to experience, from the collective and general to the individual and personal. However, the characters’ epiphanic self-awareness is always and exclusively paid by happiness, the loss of which poses the underlying atmosphere, tone, colour, and leitmotif of each and every Trevor’s literary work.

Irish Literary Cinema

This chapter examines the adaptation of Irish literary fiction for the screen over the past century. The discussion addresses three main aspects of this theme, beginning with the influence of the cinema and cinema-going on authors as recorded in their memoirs and literary output, and the influence of cinematic form on narrative structure, the latter being most evident in the later work of James Joyce. A second strand examines notions of female agency as they are refracted through the lens of the migrant experience in the novels of Edna O’Brien, Maeve Binchy, and Colm Tóibín. Finally, the post-independence legacy, as depicted in adaptations of the novels and short stories of John McGahern and William Trevor in particular, is discussed as a means of revealing the predicament of those psychically frozen during a time of economic, social, and cultural stagnation.