Assembling Flann O´Brien
Dr Maebh Long
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 Žižek.
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– including At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman – as well as his plays, short stories, journalistic output and unpublished archival material.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.
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About Dr Maebh Long
Reviews for Assembling Flann O´Brien
Modern Language 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. Flann O'Brien was one of the many pseudonyms of the prolific Brian O'Nolan (1911-66). In this superlative scholarly study, Long (Univ. of the South Pacific, Fiji Islands) offers what is surely the best analysis presently available of Ireland's most significant postmodernist writer. In five chapters, arranged topically across several genres, readers will gain rich insight into O'Nolan's mindset. But Long does more, providing a vibrant intellectual construct for reading O'Nolan's work by way of Derrida, Agamben, Freud, Lucan, and Zizek. Copious in its analysis, substantial in its notes and bibliography, Long's study makes a major contribution to Irish studies. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.
R. R. Joly
Asbury University