Overview
Since the appearance of her first novel, The Country Girls, in 1960-a book that undermined the nation's ideal of innocent and pious Irish girlhood--Edna O'Brien has provoked controversy in her native Ireland and abroad. Indeed, several of her early novels were condemned by church authorities and banned by the Irish government for their frank portrayals of sexual matters and the inner lives of women. Now an internationally acclaimed writer, O'Brien must be critically reassessed for a twenty-first century audience. Edna O'Brien and the Art of Fiction provides an urgent retrospective consideration of one of the English-speaking world's best-selling and most prolific contemporary authors. Drawing on O'Brien's fiction as well as archival material, and applying new theoretical approaches-including ecocritical and feminist new materialist readings-this study considers the pioneering and enduring ways O'Brien represents women's experience, family relationships, the natural world, sex, creativity, and death, and her work's long anticipation of contemporary movements such as #metoo.
Full Product Details
Author: Maureen O'Connor
Publisher: Bucknell University Press,U.S.
Imprint: Bucknell University Press,U.S.
Dimensions:
Width: 15.20cm
, Height: 1.50cm
, Length: 22.90cm
Weight: 0.283kg
ISBN: 9781684483358
ISBN 10: 1684483352
Pages: 180
Publication Date: 15 October 2021
Recommended Age: From 18 to 99 years
Audience:
College/higher education
,
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us.
Reviews
In this meticulous, forensic and illuminating work of scholarship, Dr. O'Connor sets the benchmark for all future studies of one of Ireland's greatest writers. In what amounts to a powerful work of restorative justice, she establishes once and for all the high and deliberate guiding intelligence that animates O'Brien's work. --Theo Dorgan author of Orpheus Readable yet theoretically sophisticated, this welcome new study offers an authoritative look at one of Ireland's greatest--and historically most underappreciated--writers. O'Connor ranges comprehensively through O'Brien's canon to trace her career-long feminist critique of Irish society's patriarchal mores. Both a history of O'Brien criticism and an examination of her work, O'Connor's exciting study offers a forceful defense of O'Brien's craft and an unapologetic critique of the social forces hampering the reception and interpretation of her canon. This study is destined to become required reading in O'Brien studies. --Kathleen Costello-Sullivan author of Trauma and Recovery in the Twenty-first Century Irish Novel Maureen O'Connor nails once and (one hopes) for all the myth of Edna O'Brien as wailing Irish banshee. Instead O'Connor makes a scholarly and at the same time impassioned case for O'Brien as a serious, creative artist thoroughly cognizant of what she is about and decades ahead of her fellow Irish in her analysis of political, social, and environmental ills. --Heather Ingman author of Irish Women's Fiction: From Edgeworth to Enright
Maureen O'Connor nails once and (one hopes) for all the myth of Edna O'Brien as wailing Irish banshee. Instead O'Connor makes a scholarly and at the same time impassioned case for O'Brien as a serious, creative artist thoroughly cognizant of what she is about and decades ahead of her fellow Irish in her analysis of political, social and environmental ills. --Heather Ingman author of Irish Women's Fiction: From Edgeworth to Enright
Author Information
MAUREEN O'CONNOR lectures in English at University College Cork in Cork, Ireland. She is the author of The Female and the Species: The Animal in Irish Women’s Writing and co-editor of Edna O’Brien: New Critical Perspectives, Wild Colonial Girl: Essays on Edna O’Brien, and Ireland and India: Colonies, Culture, and Empire.
