Ruben Borg

This the first monograph to examine Joycean time from a Deleuzian perspective.

The Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

Focusing on a recurring theme in twentieth-century film and literature, the fantasy of surviving one’s own death, Fantasies of Self-Mourning describes the formal features of a posthuman, cyborgian imaginary at work in modernism.

Modernism, the Posthuman and the Finite

Fantasies of Self-Mourning

Paul Fagan

John McCourt

Recent years have witnessed a series of shifts in the reception of Brian O'Nolan's work, with the publication of collected short stories and dramatic texts and a systematic critical reappraisal of once marginal titles in the author's canon. The vast collections of O'Nolan's correspondence, manuscripts and drafts housed in Illinois, Boston, and Texas, - as well as The Irish Times online digital archive - have given rise to genetic and cultural materialist approaches that seek to explore the borders of authorship and authority in O'Nolan's ever-expanding oeuvre. And while longer-running critical conversations continue to be finessed about the ways in which O'Nolan's texts are shaped by towering twentieth-century figures such as Joyce and Beckett, the increasingly international contexts in which O'Nolan is being read invite us to reconsider his profile as a satirist, a local comedian, a critic of provincial attitudes, a formal innovator and a powerful, inimitable voice in the twentieth-century avant-garde. As the boundaries of his body of work continue to be redrawn, O'Nolan's writing appears to be constantly repositioning itself between local and international perspectives, displaying an uncanny knack for comic doubling and self-contradiction, embracing the innovative spirit of the times, yet unmasking its pretentions.

Problems with Authority

Flann O'Brien

Werner Huber

Employing a wide range of critical perspectives and new comparative contexts, Flann O'Brien: Contesting Legacies breaks new ground in Brian O'Nolan scholarship (he wrote his novels under the name of Flann O'Brien) by testing a number of popular commonplaces about this Irish (post-) Modernist author. Challenging the narrative that Flann O'Brien wrote two good novels and then retired to the inferior medium of journalism (as Myles na gCopaleen), the collection engages with overlooked shorter, theatrical, and non-fiction works and columns ('John Duffy's Brother', 'The Martyr's Crown', 'Two in One') alongside At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, and An Béal Bocht. The depth and consistency of O'Nolan's comic inspiration that emerges from this scholarly engagement with his broader body of work underlines both the imperative and opportunity of reassessing O'Brien's literary legacy. Finally, the contributors excavate O'Nolan's oeuvre as fertile territory for a broad range of critical perspectives by confronting some of the more complex ideological positions tested in his writing. Employing perspectives from genetic criticism and cultural materialism to post-modernism and deconstruction, the essays gathered in this volume address with new critical rigor the author's gender politics, his language politics, his parodies of nationalism, his ideology of science, and his treatment of the theme of justice.

Ruben Borg

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