Flann O'Brien and Modernism

This new anthology on the fiction of Flann O'Brien brings a much-needed refreshment to the state of scholarship on this increasingly recognised but still widely misunderstood 'second generation' modernist. Rather than construe him as a postmodernist, it correctly locates O'Brien's work as the product of a late modernist sensibility and cultural context. Similarly, while there should be no doubt of his Irishness, and his profound debts to Irish language, history and culture, this collection seeks to understand O'Brien's nationally sensitive achievement as the work of an internationalist whose preoccupations reflect global modernist trends.

The distinct themes and concerns tracked in Flann O'Brien and Modernism include characterization in branching narrative forms; the ethics and paradoxes of naming; parody and homage; lies and deception; theatricality; sexuality; technology and transport; and the inevitable matter of drink and intoxication.

Taken together, these specific topics construct a mosaic image of O'Brien as an exemplary modernist auteur, abreast of all the most salient philosophical and technical concerns affecting literary production in the period immediately before and after World War Two. Written by a range of modernist scholars, from the well-established to the emergent, the collection speaks directly to many of the dominant concerns in modernist studies today, and uses its single-author focus to refract modernist scholarship along a spectrum of formal, cultural, and political problems definitive of the modern period.

Julian Murphet is Professor of Modern Film and Literature at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He is the author of Multimedia Modernism (2009), Literature and Race in Los Angeles (2001), co-author of Narrative and Media (2005), and co-editor of Literature and Visual Technologies (2003).

Ronan McDonald is the Australian Ireland Fund Chair in Modern Irish Studies and Director of the Global Irish Studies Centre at the University of New South Wales, Australia. His recent publications include Tragedy and Irish Literature: Synge, O'Casey, Beckett (2002), The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett (2006), and a special issue of the Yearbook of English Studies (2005) on 'Irish Writing since 1950'.

Sascha Morrell is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of New England, Australia. She studied at the University of Cambridge and has broad interests in 19th and early-20th Century American, British and 'Antipodean' literatures.