Flann O'Brien
Gallows Humour
Published on 21. October 2020
358 pages
978-1-78205-423-8 (ISBN)
Description
The essays collected in this volume draw unprecedented critical attention to the centrality of politics in Flann O'Brien's art. The organising theme of Gallows humour focuses these inquiries onto key encounters between the body and the law, between death and the comic spirit in the author's canon. These innovative analyses explore the place of biopolitics in O'Brien's modernist experimentation and popular writing through reflections on his handling of the thematics of violence, justice, capital punishment, eugenics, prosthetics, skin, prostitution, syphilis, rape, reproduction, illness, auto-immune deficiency, abjection, drinking, Gaelic games and masculinist nationalism across a diverse range of genres, intertexts, contexts.
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10/2020
Cork University Press
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Content
- Intro
- Half Title
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Notes on contributors
- Editors' introduction
- Part I. Body Politics
- 1. Everybody Here Is under Arrest: Translation and politics in Cruiskeen Lawn
- 2. 'nothing in the world would save me from the gallows': O'Nolan and the death penalty
- 3. Carnival and Class Consciousness: Bakhtin and the Free State in At Swim-Two-Birds
- 4. Spare-Time Physical Activities: Cruiskeen Lawn, the GAA and the Irish modernist body
- 5. The Soft Misogyny of Good Intentions: The Mother and Child Scheme, Cruiskeen Lawn and The Hard Life
- Part II: Failing Bodies
- 6. 'Where you bin, bud?' Myles na gCopaleen's disappearing act
- 7. 'the situation had become deplorably fluid': Alcohol, alchemy and Brian O'Nolan's metamorphoses
- 8. 'the tattered cloak of his perished skin': The body as costume in 'Two in One', At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman
- 9. 'Veni, V.D., Vici': Flann O'Brien, sexual health and the literature of exhaustion
- 10. Abject Bodies: Brian O'Nolan and immunology
- Part III: Bodies of Writing
- 11. Reading the Regional Body: Disability, prosthetics and Irish literary tradition in The Third Policeman and Molloy
- 12. Law and Violence in Ferguson's Congal, Yeats's The Herne's Egg and O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds
- 13. 'sprakin sea Djoytsch?' Brian Ó Nualláin's Bhark i bPrágrais
- 14. Flann O'Brien, the Absurd and the Authenticity of Death
- 15. 'the essential inherent interior essence': The Third Policeman and early modern ontologies
- 16. Origin, Iterability and Violence in The Third Policeman
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Backcover
