Flann O'Brien & Modernism

Julian Murphet, Ronan McDonald, Sascha Morrell

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781623568504
• eBook ISBN: 9781623568757
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Flann O'Brien & Modernism brings a much-needed refreshment to the state of scholarship on this increasingly recognised but still widely misunderstood 'second generation' modernist. Rather than construe him as a postmodernist, it correctly locates O'Brien's work as the product of a late modernist sensibility and cultural context. Similarly, while there should be no doubt of his Irishness, and his profound debts to Irish language, history and culture, this collection seeks to understand O'Brien's nationally sensitive achievement as the work of an internationalist whose preoccupations reflect global modernist trends. The distinct themes and concerns tracked in Flann O'Brien & Modernism include characterization in branching narrative forms; the ethics and paradoxes of naming; parody and homage; lies and deception; theatricality; sexuality; technology and transport; and the inevitable matter of drink and intoxication. Taken together, these specific topics construct a mosaic image of O'Brien as an exemplary modernist auteur, abreast of all the most salient philosophical and technical concerns affecting literary production in the period immediately before and after World War Two.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Making Evil, with Flann O’Brien
• Chapter 2 Mythomaniac Modernism: Lying and Bullshit in Flann O’Brien
• Chapter 3 ‘The Outward Accidents of Illusion’: O’Brien and the Theatrical
• Chapter 4 The Ghost of ‘Poor Jimmy Joyce’: A Portrait of the Artist as a Reluctant Modernist
• Chapter 5 ‘Do You Know What I’m Going to Tell You?’: Flann O’Brien, Risibility and the Anxiety of Influence
• Chapter 6 An Béal Bocht, Translation and the Proper Name
• Chapter 7 Ploughmen without Land: Flann O’Brien and Patrick Kavanagh
• Chapter 8 Flann O’Brien’s Ulysses: Marginalia and the Modernist Mind
• Chapter 9 ‘Truth is an Odd Number’: Flann O’Brien and Infinite Imperfection
• Chapter 10 ‘An Astonishing Parade of Nullity’: Nihilism in The Third Policeman
• Chapter 11 Flann O’Brien and Modern Character
• Chapter 12 ‘No Unauthorized Boozing’: Flann O’Brien and the Thirsty Muse
• Chapter 13 Soft Drink, Hard Drink and Literary (Re)production in Flann O’Brien and Frank Moorhouse
• Chapter 14 Flann O’Brien’s Aestho-Autogamy
• Chapter 15 Modernist Wheelmen
• Index