Flann O'Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-Modernist (Poetry/literary criticism) [Paperback]

Keith Hopper (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1995 | ISBN-10: 1859180426 | ISBN-13: 978-1859180426 | Edition: 1st Edition.

A major contribution to the study of post-modernist literature in contemporary Ireland

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Hopper is a good explicator, his approach is illuminating and such enthusiasm for Flann O'Brien is infectious." --David Malcolm, Times Literary Supplement, October 30, 2009

"This study is impressive, even brilliant, in its scope, thoroughness, mastery, and persuasiveness. Not to be missed is its clear delineation of postmodernism as a valid and defined literary approach. Summing Up: Highly recommended." --R. R. Joly, CHOICE Reviews Online, October 2009

"Hopper is a good explicator, his approach is illuminating and such enthusiasm for Flann O'Brien is infectious." -- David Malcolm, Times Literary Supplement, October 30, 2009

"This study is impressive, even brilliant, in its scope, thoroughness, mastery, and persuasiveness. Not to be missed is its clear delineation of postmodernism as a valid and defined literary approach. Summing Up: Highly recommended." --R. R. Joly, CHOICE Reviews Online, October 2009 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Keith Hopper is text editor for the Series. He is Senior Scholar at Kellogg College, Oxford.

Product Details

• Paperback: 292 pages
• Publisher: Cork University Press; 1st Edition. edition (May 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1859180426
• ISBN-13: 978-1859180426
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,640,678 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great book about a misunderstood writer, June 15, 2000

By 

"lexo-2" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Flann O'Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-Modernist (Poetry/literary criticism) (Paperback)

Keith Hopper's study of Flann O'Brien is one of the very few essential works of Irish lit crit to be published in the last twenty years. Hopper's basic thesis is that O'Brien's most famous book, "At Swim-Two-Birds", is not his most brilliant and imaginative work. "At Swim", or "AS2B" as we O'Brien experts call it, is really a half-hearted venture in late modernism, spoiled by the author's diffidence, carelessness and sentimentality. He reaches his full powers in the savage black comedy "An Beal Bocht", which unfortunately for most people in the world was written in the Irish language, and the thoroughly eerie tale of robbery and guilt "The Third Policeman". Hopper shows how the latter book is one of the first full-blown works of postmodernism, a metafictional head-trip that prefigures Italo Calvino by about thirty years.

After the book was rejected a couple of times, O'Brien shoved the MS into a drawer (it wasn't published until after his death) and ended up frittering away his enormous talent in a decreasingly entertaining newspaper column, throwing off a couple of lame novels before his early death. It's a sad story, and Hugh Kenner has convincingly argued elsewhere that O'Brien himself was alarmed by the implications of "The Third Policeman" and made a conscious decision not to publish it.

Hopper's arguments about the status and significance of postmodernism in Ireland are a sorely-needed counter to the generally blandly realistic mode of fiction that has dominated Irish writing since Frank O'Connor got his first big royalty cheque. "The Third Policeman" is funnier, scarier and more profoundly alarming than any of John Banville's jeux de desespoirs (Banville always reads to me as though he's been translated from the Czech, anyway). An important and neglected book. Irish culture could be a lot more fun for everybody involved if Mr. Hopper had been listened to.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the importance of percussion, December 7, 2004

By 

Dr. Klamm (Austin, TX USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Flann O'Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-Modernist (Poetry/literary criticism) (Paperback)

Some commentators have argued that "The Third Policeman" is a riff on Einstein's theories of relativity, while others argue that the text is a Menippean satire that probes the limits of rational Western epistemology. Here, Hopper argues in a mostly persuasive fashion that "The Third Policeman" is a postmodern metafiction far surpassing "At Swim-Two-Birds" in cleverness and complexity, finding evidence in such areas as the obvious God-figure of Policeman Fox to the policemen's readings from Eternity, here startlingly explicated. Hopper's book is remarkably easy to read for an academic text, though I admit that by the end of the book I felt as if its points had been repeatedly hammered into my skull, perhaps by a special bicycle pump manufactured from a hollow iron bar. Incidentally, Le Clerque has drawn attention to the importance of percussion in the de Selby dialectic and shown that most of the physicist's experiments were extremely noisy. Unfortunately the hammering was always done behind closed doors and no commentator has hazarded a guess as to what was being hammered and for what purpose.