Bringing together leading international scholars, John Banville and His Precursors explores Booker and Franz Kafka prize-winning Irish author John Banville's most significant intellectual influences. The book explores how Banville's novels engage deeply with a wide range of sources, from literary figures such as Samuel Beckett, Heinrich von Kleist, Wallace Stevens, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Henry James, to thinkers such as Freud, Heidegger, and Blanchot.

Reading the full range of Banville's writings - from his Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea to his latest book, Mrs Osmond – John Banville and His Precursors reveals the richness of the author's work. In this way, the book also raises questions about the contemporary moment's relationship to a variety of intellectual and cultural traditions - Romanticism, Modernism, existentialism – and how the significance of these can be appreciated in new and often surprising ways.

Pietra Palazzolo teaches at the Open University, UK and serves on the Executive Committe of the Centre for Myth Studies at the University of Essex, UK. She is co-editor of Translating Myth (2016).

Michael Springer is an Independent Scholar and previously taught at the University of York, UK.

Stephen Butler is Lecturer in the Department of English and History at Ulster University, UK.