Set in Dublin during the Lockout of 1913, Strumpet City is a panoramic novel of city life. It embraces a wide range of social milieux, from the miseries of the tenements to the cultivated, bourgeois Bradshaws. It introduces a memorable cast of characters: the main protagonist, Fitz, a model of the hard-working, loyal and abused trade unionist; the isolated, well-meaning and ineffectual Fr O'Connor; the wretched and destitute Rashers Tierney. In the background hovers the enormous shadow of Jim Larkin, Plunkett's real-life hero. Strumpet City's popularity derives from its realism and its naturalistic presentation of traumatic historical events. There are clear heroes and villains. The book is informed by a sense of moral outrage at the treatment of the locked-out trade unionists, the indifference and evasion of the city's clergy and middle class and the squalor and degradation of the tenement slums.
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About the Author:
The late James Plunkett drew on his city-centre working-class background, and his commitment to the labour movement, as the background for his fiction. Strumpet City is acknowledged as his masterpiece. His other novels include Farewell Companions and The Circus Animals. He was an accomplished short-story writer and also wrote for radio and theatre.
Review:
`Plunkett's seminal book provided a graphic depiction of a major event in a flawed society, which was ultimately a conflict between two sets of values - the values of the slum, interdependence and collective solidarity versus the values of the quick buck' -- SIPTU President, Jack O'Connor `Many studies have been written about the quest for the Great American Novel. Anyone seeking its Irish equivalent need search no further.' Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times If there is one novel that bares the soul of Dublin as much as the 'life-in-one-day'of Ulysses, it is James Plunkett's Strumpet City. -- Donal O'Donoghue * RTE *
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- PublisherGill & Macmillan
- Publication date2006
- ISBN 10 071714058X
- ISBN 13 9780717140589
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages560
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