Very Old Bones Study Guide

Literary Precedents

In Kennedy's attention in Very Old Bones to the Irish ethnicity of the Phelans and Quinns, in his treatment of sexuality within that culture, especially that of the Phelan females, in his experimentation with narrative technique and the compression of time, in his allusions to and quotations from Finnegan's Wake (1939), in his study of the influence of family on artistic temperament and psychological development, in his documented admiration in the novel and elsewhere for James Joyce, it is impossible not to see the broader influence of Joyce's work as a whole and more specifically the thematic and social concerns of Dubliners (1914) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Certainly Kennedy's Phelans with Albany as their spiritual place are more reminiscent of Joyce's urban, ethnic Dublin than of rural American.....

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