The essays considers the contemporary Irish writer Aidan Higgins’most important novel, Langrishe Go Down (1966) as a seminal text in the history of the Big House novel and its revival since the 1960s. The analysis focuses on Higgins’rereading of the Anglo Irish decline through the imagery and rhetorical uses of the body theme as the central hermeneutic feature of this complex text, as well as on its Modernist intertextual web of references to Joyce and Eliot.
