LEONARD AND HUNGRY PAUL: THE APPEAL OF AN IRISH NOVEL TO AN ENGLISH AUDIENCE REVEALED THROUGH ANTHROPOLOGICAL FINDINGS AND A LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS
LEONARD AND HUNGRY PAUL: THE APPEAL OF AN IRISH NOVEL TO AN ENGLISH AUDIENCE REVEALED THROUGH ANTHROPOLOGICAL FINDINGS AND A LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS

Summary/Abstract: The paper discusses an extract from a novel published in 2019 by an Irish author, Rónán Hession, Leonard and Hungry Paul, which is one of the book club selections discussed in one of The Times 2025 podcasts, and which was very well received by the mostly English Times Radio audience. This analysis seeks to identify reasons why the English public resonates with the book, by bringing forward characteristics of Englishness underlined in a popular anthropology book, Watching the English, written by Kate Fox, an Oxford scholar. Recently selected as a set text for the Irish Junior Certificate in English in secondary schools, Hession’s novel nonetheless plays upon themes, which, apparently, could also function as traces of English behaviour and values: social dis-ease, humour, irony, privacy, politeness, fairness, self-consciousness, the importance of not taking oneself too seriously, etc. The corpus study limits itself to a scene where two of the characters meet for the first time, following how these themes transpire at a linguistic level, therefore this text functioning as a proof of the cultural flexibility and exportation of Englishness across the Irish border through a shared language.

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