O’Brien, Flann (1911–1966)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Hanna
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
Flann O'brien ◽  
The Third ◽  
Irish Modernism ◽  
Cultural Forms

Born Brian O’Nolan (or Ó Nualláin) in Strabane, County Tyrone, the novelist and satirist known as Flann O’Brien is now recognized as a leading figure of Irish modernism alongside James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Like Joyce and Beckett, he is also considered to be an important transitional figure to postmodernism. His experimental novels, particularly At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) and The Third Policeman (1967), employ many of the techniques later identified as postmodern, including use of parody and pastiche, recycling of genres and characters, and combining of ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural forms. Though his acclaim as a novelist was hard won and late in coming, O’Brien enjoyed significant local fame as a journalist for his Cruiskeen Lawn column, which ran in the Irish Times from 1940 to 1960 under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen (also na Gopaleen, ‘Myles of the Ponies’).

Irish Modernism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Arrington
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
English Language ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Late Modernism ◽  
Flann O'brien ◽  
Little Magazines ◽  
Religious Conservatism ◽  
Irish Modernism

Although Irish writers were foundational to English-language modernism, Irish Modernism is a new field in literary studies. Embedded imperial frameworks and assumptions about Irish traditionalism have been an obstacle to recognizing Irish Modernism, despite the importance of Irish writing to the development of modernism as a whole. Informed by postcolonial and transnational theory, a reading of Irish Modernism accommodates writers who lived and wrote in and about Ireland, as well as those who were Irish by birth but who lived and worked outside of the country, such as James Joyce; who wrote in languages other than English or Irish, such as Samuel Beckett; or whose political allegiances are at odds with the rise of the separatist nation state, such as Elizabeth Bowen. Irish Modernism has its genesis in the Irish Revival (ca. 1880s–1910s), a popular movement that sought to create a distinctive Irish culture. The little magazines and literary theaters that arose out of the Revival were often aesthetically conservative in themselves; nonetheless, they became venues for literature that was radical in form. Just as early modernist writing arose out of the Revival, high modernist literature was provoked by a rejection of the Revival’s values. These reactions are exemplified in William Butler Yeats’s poetry from The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910), in which he castigates the Irish public for its religious conservatism, and in Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Late modernism, which is typified by a weakening of the tropes of high modernism to make way for a more politically engaged literature, not only includes well-known Anglophone writers but also the work of Brian Ó Nualláin/Flann O’Brien and Máirtín Ó Cadhain, whose satires were formally and politically radical.

Flann O'Brien, James Joyce, and the Queer Art of Bare Concealment

Éire-Ireland ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 8-36
Author(s):  
Catherine Flynn
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Flann O'brien ◽  
Queer Art

scholarly journals Translation and genetic criticism: Genetic and editorial approaches to the ‘untranslatable’ in Joyce and Beckett

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk Van Hulle
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Main Function ◽  
Genetic Criticism ◽  
Research Hypothesis

A genetics of translation may suggest a unidirectional link between two fields of research (genetic criticism applied to translations), but there are many ways in which translation and genetic criticism interact. This article’s research hypothesis is that an exchange of ideas between translation studies and genetic criticism can be mutually beneficial in more than one way. Their main function is to enhance a form of textual awareness, and to this end they inform each other in at least five different ways: genesis as part of translation; translation of the genesis; genesis of the translation; translation as part of the genesis; and finally the genesis of the untranslatable. To study this nexus translation/genetic criticism the works of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett will serve as case studies.

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