This volume shows how attention to McGahern's literary spaces provides a greater understanding of the aesthetic, vision and form of each novel, and allows us to understand those aspects relative to the social, cultural and political undercurrents of the works individually and collectively.

John Singleton was awarded his PhD in English from the National University of Ireland, Galway, in 2020. He has taught across various disciplines in the School of English and Creative Arts and the Centre for Irish Studies at NUI, Galway, since 2016. His main research interests are Modern Literature and Drama in English, Creative Writing, Irish Studies and Spatiality. His research has been published in the Review of Irish Studies in Europe, NPPSH Reflections and The Graveyard in Literature: Liminality and Social Critique.

Introduction: The House of Vision: From Darkness to the Rising Sun

Part I: Plato's Cave: Jumping at Shadows in the Family Home

Chapter 1 - The Medusa's Mirror, Motherhood and a Woman's Place in The Barracks

Chapter 2 - Rejecting Convention and 'The Ireland that we Dreamed of' in The Dark

Chapter 3 - Rising from the Cave in Nightlines

Part II: The Heterotopia: New and Uncertain Beginnings

Chapter 4 - The Road Away Becomes the Road Back: Brutal Experiments in The Leavetaking and The Pornographer

Chapter 5 - Standing Outside Life: Emergence and Transformation in Getting Through and High Ground

Part III: The Halfway House: Emergent Forms of Home

Chapter 6 - In the Halfway House: Custom, Ritual and the Social World of Manners in Amongst Women

Chapter 7 - A Life of One's Own: Displacement and Transgression in the Late Stories

Part IV: The Fifth Province: Responsibilities in the Deep Hearth's Core

Chapter 8 - Responsibilities in the Hearth of the House of Light: That They May Face the Rising Sun

Chapter 9 - Reimagining Darkness: Continuity and Contrast in The Rockingham Shoot and Other Dramatic Works

Conclusion: The Poetics of Dreaming and Time Regained in Memoir