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 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.

Flann O'Brien: Acting out is the first full-length study to comprehensively address the themes of performance, masking and illusion in the author's fiction, columns, correspondence and scripts. These essays reveal, for the first time, the fullness of O'Brien's literary engagements with diverse theatrical movements (melodrama, revivalism, tableaux vivant, Grand Guignol, modernist anti-theatre) and playwrights (Shakespeare, Goethe, Boucicault, Synge, Yeats, Gregory, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, Čapek). Often considered a lonely pioneer of the Irish novel, the author is here resituated both among a troupe of mid-century playwrights, producers and performers (mac Liammoír, Edwards, Saroyan, Montgomery, Sheridan, MacNamara, O'Dea) and in front of discrete local audiences (at The Irish Times, the Abbey, the Gate, Radio Éireann, Telefís Éireann). A new picture of O'Brien emerges as a performative and collaborative writer, firmly imbedded in the cultural networks and institutions of his time and place. Flann O'Brien: Acting out draws unprecedented attention to the author's critically neglected writing for stage and screen (Thirst, Faustus Kelly, Rhapsody in Stephen's Green, An Sgian, The Handsome Carvers, Mairéad Gillan, The Dead Spit of Kelly). These scripts are here reevaluated against their historical contexts and through their thematics of war, nationalism, gender, nonhuman bodies and posthuman identity. At the same time, innovative readings of the role of masking and mimicry in the fiction and columns (At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, 'John Duffy's Brother', 'The Martyr's Crown', Cruiskeen Lawn) shed new critical light on O'Brien's pseudonyms, his theories of literary performance, his modulation of comic and tragic tone, and his shifting place in Irish modernism.

This book focuses on previously unexplored gaps, limitations and avenues of inquiry within the canon and scholarship of Irish modernism to develop a more attentive and fluid theoretical account of this conceptual field. Foregrounding interfaces between literary, visual, musical, dramatic, cinematic, epistolary and journalistic media, these essays introduce previously peripheral writers, artists and cultural figures to debates about Irish modernism: Hannah Berman, Ethel Colburn Mayne, Mary Devenport O’Neill, Sheila Wingfield, Freda Laughton, Rhoda Coghill, Elizabeth Bowen, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Joseph Plunkett, Liam O’Flaherty, Edward Martyn, Jane Barlow, Seosamh Ó Torna, Jack B. Yeats and Brian O’Nolan all feature here to interrogate the term’s implications. Probing Irish modernism’s responsiveness to contemporary theory beyond postcolonial and Irish studies, Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities uses diverse paradigms, including weak theory, biopolitics, posthumanism and the nonhuman turn, to rethink Irish modernism’s organising themes: the material body, language, mediality, canonicity, war, state violence, prostitution, temporality, death, mourning. Across the volume, cutting-edge work from queer theory and gender studies draws urgent attention to the too-often marginalized importance of women’s writing and queer expression to the Irish avant-garde, while critical reappraisals of the coordinates of race and national history compel us to ask not only where and when Irish modernism occurred, but also whose modernism it was?

Consciousness is a hugely important brain phenomenon, but until now it has been a very poorly understood one in conceptual terms. However, a major breakthrough in our conceptual understanding has been made, and a radical new school of philosophical thought on the subject has arisen; and what we are now discovering consciousness to be, is truly mind-blowing! WHEN NIGHT FALLS explains this new school of philosophical thought on what conscious-mind is, how it relates to the brain, to our memory, and to the external world; and also discusses its existential implications, especially concerning the issue of conscious Life-After-Death.

Employing a wide range of critical perspectives and new comparative contexts, Flann O'Brien: Contesting Legacies breaks new ground in O'Brien scholarship by testing a number of popular commonplaces about this Irish (post-) Modernist author. Challenging the narrative that Flann O'Brien wrote two good novels and then retired to the inferior medium of journalism (as Myles na gCopaleen), the collection engages with overlooked shorter, theatrical, and non-fiction works and columns ('John Duffy's Brother', 'The Martyr's Crown', 'Two in One') alongside At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, and An Beal Bocht. The depth and consistency of O'Nolan's comic inspiration that emerges from this scholarly engagement with his broader body of work underlines both the imperative and opportunity of reassessing O'Brien's literary legacy. Challenging the critical standard of O'Brien as a provincial writer, these essays reveal his writing as a space that uniquely complicates the old lines between stay-at-home conservatism and international experimentalism. Renegotiating O'Brien's place in the European Avant-Garde alongside tensions closer to home - Republicanism, the Gaelic tradition, the Dublin literary scene - the collection reveals as outdated prejudice the dismissal of his talent as a matter of localised interest. Finally, the contributors excavate O'Nolan's oeuvre as fertile territory for a broad range of critical perspectives by confronting some of the more complex ideological positions tested in his writing. Employing perspectives from genetic criticism and cultural materialism to post-modernism and deconstruction, the essays gathered in this volume address with new critical rigour the author's gender politics, his language politics, his parodies of nationalism, his ideology of science, and his treatment of the theme of justice.

This book focuses on previously unexplored gaps, limitations and avenues of inquiry within the canon and scholarship of Irish modernism to develop a more attentive and fluid theoretical account of this conceptual field. Foregrounding interfaces between literary, visual, musical, dramatic, cinematic, epistolary and journalistic media, these essays introduce previously peripheral writers, artists and cultural figures to debates about Irish modernism: Hannah Berman, Ethel Colburn Mayne, Mary Devenport O'Neill, Sheila Wingfield, Freda Laughton, Rhoda Coghill, Elizabeth Bowen, Mairtin O Cadhain, Joseph Plunkett, Liam O'Flaherty, Edward Martyn, Jane Barlow, Seosamh O Torna, Jack B. Yeats and Brian O'Nolan all feature here to interrogate the term's implications. Probing Irish modernism's responsiveness to contemporary theory beyond postcolonial and Irish studies, Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities uses diverse paradigms, including weak theory, biopolitics, posthumanism and the nonhuman turn, to rethink Irish modernism's organising themes: the material body, language, mediality, canonicity, war, state violence, prostitution, temporality, death, mourning. Across the volume, cutting-edge work from queer theory and gender studies draws urgent attention to the too-often marginalized importance of women's writing and queer expression to the Irish avant-garde, while critical reappraisals of the coordinates of race and national history compel us to ask not only where and when Irish modernism occurred, but also whose modernism it was?