Assembling Flann O'Brien - Hardcover

Maebh Long

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1441187057 ISBN 13: 9781441187055

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014

Synopsis

Flann O Brien - also known as Brian O Nolan or Myles na gCopaleen - is now widely recognised as one of the foremost of Ireland s modern authors. Assembling Flann O Brien explores the author s innovative and experimental work by reading him in relation to some of the 20th century s most important theorists, including Derrida, Agamben, Freud, Lacan and i ek.

Assembling Flann O Brien offers a detailed study of O Brien s five major novels including At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman as well as his plays, short stories, journalistic output and unpublished archival material. The book presents new theoretical perspectives on his works, exploring his compelling engagements with questions of the proper name, the archive, law, and desire, and the problems of identity, language, sexuality and censorship which acutely troubled Ireland s new state. Combining a wide range of contemporary theory with a sensitivity to the cultural and political context in which the author wrote, Maebh Long opens up entirely new aspects of Flann O Brien s writings, and explores the ingenious and the problematic within his oeuvre.

About this title

Review:

Maebh Long s assembling of high theory and archival material within specific cultural contexts makes for a compelling read. Her bilingual analysis of An Béal Bocht /The Poor Mouth is astute, and her fluid reading of O Brien s later novels is a valuable contribution to existing Flanneur scholarship. --Keith Hopper, St Mary s University College, Twickenham (author of Flann O Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-modernist)

This is a fine, thought-provoking study, offering nuanced, lucid, witty and philosophically rich readings of the Flann O'Brien oeuvre in all its uniquely unassemblable strangeness. Maebh Long's Assembling Flann O'Brien promises to be an engaging and valuable work for students and scholars alike. --Nicholas Royle, Professor of English, University of Sussex, UK

Hugely erudite yet wonderfully alive to the entertainingly ludic qualities of its subject, Maebh Long's witty and engaging account is the first book-length study of Flann O'Brien that manages to do full justice to the 'singularity' of the work of this most learned, daring and brilliantly slippery writer. The book is a tour de force that brings to its task of explication, appreciation and critique, a wealth of scholarship, theoretical understanding and critical dexterity. --Patricia Waugh, Professor of English at Durham University, UK

About the Author:

Maebh Long is Lecturer in Literature at the University of the South Pacific, the Fiji Islands.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1441187057
• ISBN 13: 9781441187055
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256