In Assembling Flann O’Brien, Maebh Long has set out on a difficult task: to assemble the unassemblable. It is to her credit that the book succeeds at its task ... [Her] dexterity as a critic is impressive.
Modern Language Review
Maebh Long’s assembling of high theory and archival material within specific cultural contexts makes for a compelling read. ... Read moreHer 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
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