The Selected Essays of Sean O'Faolain

Brad Kent

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780773547766
• eBook ISBN: 9780773548626
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Sean O’Faolain (1900-1991) was Ireland’s leading social and political critic in the period following the country’s independence from the United Kingdom. Since his death, scholarly opinion has alternately cast him as an arch-revisionist, a liberal nationalist, and a frustrated republican. The Selected Essays of Sean O’Faolain reassesses his reputation by showing that he wrote in the tradition of post-Enlightenment European intellectuals, and that while he was a significant figure in Ireland, his work extends beyond immediate national concerns.

This volume includes over fifty unabridged essays by O’Faolain on a wide range of subjects - from canonical writers to architecture, from religious scandals to economics, from nationalism to internationalism, from long-dead historical figures to recent controversies. O’Faolain’s fearlessness in taking on the major political, cultural, and religious figures of his day, his masterly use of rhetoric, and his intellectual acuity have contributed to his works being quoted often by scholars working across several disciplines. Many of these essays appear here in print for the first time since they were published in the foremost periodicals of their day. An extensive introduction and helpful annotations contextualise and explain them for a new audience.

In his re-readings of history and challenges to dominant historiographical trends, O’Faolain has become a pariah to some and a hero to others. The Selected Essays of Sean O’Faolain bridges some of these competing visions, presenting a more complex figure through his varied corpus of writing.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Editorial Practice
• Suggested Thematic Groupings
• Essays: 1928–39
• The Cruelty and Beauty of Words
• Censorship in America
• Celts and Irishmen
• Literary Provincialism
• The Modern Novel: A Catholic Point of View
• Revamping Ireland
• Roger Casement
• Dickens and Thackeray
• Daniel Corkery
• The Dangers of Censorship
• Don Quixote O’Flaherty
• Æ and W.B.
• Essays: 1940–45
• This is Your Magazine
• Jack B. Yeats
• Frederick Robert Higgins (1896–1941)
• Ah, Wisha! The Irish Novel
• Standards and Taste
• Ulster
• Our Nasty Novelists
• The Gaelic League
• The Mart of Ideas
• That Typical Irishman
• The Senate and Censorship
• Gaelic – The Truth
• Ireland and the Modern World
• On State Control
• Books and a Live People
• The Strange Case of Sean O’Casey
• The Stuffed Shirts
• Shadow and Substance
• The Plain People of Ireland
• The State and its Writers
• The University Question
• Toryism in Trinity
• One World
• The Pleasures and Pains of Ireland
• The Gaelic Cult
• Eamon de Valera
• Romance and Realism
• One World: An Irish Council
• All Things Considered – 1
• All Things Considered – 2
• Essays: 1946–76
• Shaw’s Prefaces
• Rebel by Vocation
• On Translating from the Irish
• The Dilemma of Irish Letters
• Religious Art
• Autoantiamericanism
• The Death of Nationalism
• The Dáil and the Bishops
• On a Recent Incident at the International Affairs Association
• The Irish and the Latins
• Love Among the Irish
• Fifty Years of Irish Writing
• A Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man
• Index