Prose Rhythm In Amongst Women

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An examination of Prose Rhythm in Amongst Women Author John McGahern’s three novels The Barracks, The Dark and Amongst Women all have one thing in common and that is McGahern’s portrayal of violence in one form or another. When people read Amongst Women they will notice that this novel is utterly unlike the other two in one respect and is the rarest of things in contemporary fiction in English that has been acclaimed, an almost perfect work. In Amongst Women McGahern works within a narrow compass and most of the setting in the novel is set in rural Ireland, among small farmers, village policeman, and teachers. When McGahern moves to the city it’s the country folk’s he writes about, those who live in flats and go home for the weekends. In reality Dublin has many flats on building sites, in factories, in government offices and McGahern understands these people, their loves and longings, their hatreds, their fierce loyalties, and captures in his work the harsh poetry of their lives. McGahern neither romanticizes nor simplifies Amongst Women; his is an immensely subtle and sophisticated art of telling a story of a family raising five children in rural Ireland. When people that are not familiar with Irish fiction read Amongst Women they will most likely come to the conclusion that the main character Michael Moran is mentally abusive towards his family in one way or another, but when readers analyze this novel they will find out this violence occurred mainly because of generation gaps between Moran and his family. Throughout Amongst Women readers can examine McGahern’s writing techniques through the style of Prose Rhythm. The literary term “prose rhythm” can be seen in poetry and literature and be defined as “is a form of poetry which uses fewer rules and limitations using either rhymed or unrhymed lines that have no set fixed metrical pattern. The early 20th-century

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