ABSTRACT
This chapter examines two recent novels by the Irish-Canadian authors Ed O’Loughlin and Emma Donoghue in the context of their appropriations of Stevens's early poem “The Snow Man”. O’Loughlin and Donoghue both broaden the search for order in Banville and McCann via a Stevensian aesthetic that is underlined by implicit connections between objects, characters, and ways of knowing and disrupted by inconsistencies and silences. Reading Stevens's poem with the novels allows the metaphysical nullity at the heart of “The Snow Man” to relativize the general quest for order and encompassing vision while also positing how art is able to give voice to this self-conscious construction.
