Book Review: Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies
Laura Ryan, University of Manchester
Ruben Borg, Paul Fagan and Werner Huber (eds.), Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies (Cork: Cork University Press, 2014)
Few 20th-century authors have experienced a critical renaissance as spectacular as Brian O’Nolan, who wrote under several pseudonyms during his life (Myles na gCopaleen, George Knowall, Brother Barnabus, Count O’Blather) but is best-known as Flann O’Brien, the nom de plume under which he composed his two most famous works: At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) and The Third Policemen (1967). A proliferation of O’Nolan scholarship since 2000 has considered the Strabane-born author as variously a late modernist and an early postmodernist and aimed to widen the contexts within which he has been considered. Yet the tendency within modernist studies and Irish literary studies to compare O’Nolan (largely unfavourably) with his exiled compatriots James Joyce and Samuel Beckett and to consider him a provincial author and a wasted talent has to some extent endured.
