John Banville, Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City

Kevin Boyle (Dublin City University)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.4: Irish Writing and Culture, 400-present.
Vol. editors: Paul Delaney (Trinity College Dublin), Anne Markey (Dublin City University), Ian Campbell Ross (Trinity College Dublin), Sinéad Sturgeon (Queen's University Belfast)

Dates

First circulation or publication 2003

Places

Ireland, Republic of (Eire) (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Non-Fiction
- Commentary / Criticism (literary)
- Guidebooks / Travel writing
Essays/ Lectures (any)

Resources

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Published as part of Bloomsbury’s “The Writer and The City” series, John Banville’s

Prague Pictures: Portraits of A City

(2003) can be considered a work of travel literature, albeit with frequent deviations from the subject material of general works in this genre. In this book the author recalls his several journeys to the city he describes as “mysterious, jumbled, fantastical, absurd” (9) over a period of roughly twenty years, his first visit being in the early 1980s.

Prague Pictures

is Banville’s first work of non-fiction and, like the other texts in the series, this work is an atypical piece of travel writing and defies simple description. Banville merges fiction with fact, scholarly rigour with playful parody, and earnestness with comic insincerity as he writes about the…

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2342 words

Citation: Boyle, Kevin. "Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 September 2013 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=13222, accessed 25 April 2024.]

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