Challenging the critical standard of O’Brien as a provincial writer, these essays reveal his writing as a space that uniquely complicates the old lines between stay-at-home conservatism and international experimentalism. Renegotiating O’Brien’s place in the European Avant-Garde alongside tensions closer to home – Republicanism, the Gaelic tradition, the Dublin literary scene – the collection reveals as outdated prejudice the dismissal of his talent as a matter of localised interest.
Finally, the contributors excavate O’Nolan’s oeuvre as fertile territory for a broad range of critical perspectives by confronting some of the more complex ideological positions tested in his writing. Employing perspectives from genetic criticism and cultural materialism to post-modernism and deconstruction, the essays gathered in this volume address with new critical rigour the author’s gender politics, his language politics, his parodies of nationalism, his ideology of science, and his treatment of the theme of justice.
Ruben Borg and Paul Fagan are to co-founders of the International Flann O’Brien Society. Werner Huber was the host organiser of the 2011 Flann O’Brien Centenary Conference at the Vienna Centre for Irish Studies; the largest conference ever held on the author. [Read More]
