Ireland Through the Looking-Glass: Flann O???Brien, Myles na gCopaleen and Irish [Hardcover]

Ireland Through the Looking Glassexplores O???Nolan???s broad-ranging humor (as novelist and newspaper columnist) in its cultural contexts. What emerges from this fresh perspective is an original portrait of him as a writer whose work was at once in conflict with, and wholly indebted tom, the charged cultural politics of the new state.

This is the first book to thoroughly combine both aspects of his literary career, illuminating how his episodic novels relate to the journalism which he wrote throughout his life. It demonstrates how his recurrent preoccupation with the persona and role of the author was as much shaped by the difficult position of the Irish writer in the 1930s and 1940s as it was by literary modernism. Each chapter within the book focuses on a different aspect of O???Nolan???s multi-faceted career, charting his development from a playful literary humorist to a peculiarly astute cultural critic.

This is the first book to demonstrate in detail what O???Nolan???s varying blend of parody, satire and surreal humor owed to the peculiar cultural climate of the mid-twentieth century Ireland. By exploring the links between comedy and culture, it exposes the humorist???s curiously ambivalent response to the culture of the new state, and particularly to the position of the writer within it.Acknowledgements; Textual Note; Introduction: Ireland Through the Looking-Glass; 1) The cult of the Author: Brian, Flann and Myles; 2) The Genesis of At Swim-Two-Birds; 3) ???Nonsense is a New Sense???: The Third Policemanin 1939; 4) Irish Myles: Cruiskeen Lawnand An B??al Bocht; 5) Newspaper Wars: Cruiskeen Lawnin the 1940s; 6) ???The Dublin Character???: Plays and Later Work; Afterword; Notes and References; Bibliography; Index. Looking at the work of Brian O'Nolan, who wrote under the names of Flann O'Brien and Myles na gCopaleen, this study is not for beginners. l£!