Katherine Ebury - Böcker

This edited volume aims to reposition intertextuality in relation to recent trends in critical practice. Inspired by the work of Sara Ahmed in particular, our authors explore and reconfigure classic theories of authorship, influence and the text (including those by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Harold Bloom), updating these conversations to include intersectionality specifically, broadly understood to include gendered, racial and other forms of social justice including disability, and the progressive impact of the transmission and transformation of texts. This diverse volume includes discussions of major canonical works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses alongside the recent contemporary literature by authors such as Siri Husvedt and Maggie O’Farrell, as well as theoretical interventions. This volume also engages with how intertextuality can facilitate interdisciplinary and ekphrastic thinking and representation, as the inspiration of music and the visual arts for texts and their transmission is addressed. The choice of intertexts become deliberately political, ethical and artistic signifiers for the authors discussed in this volume, and our contributors are thus enabled to address topics ranging from visual impairment to Shakespearean motherhood to the influence of Jazz culture on writing on the Northern Irish Troubles.

This edited volume aims to reposition intertextuality in relation to recent trends in critical practice. Inspired by the work of Sara Ahmed in particular, our authors explore and reconfigure classic theories of authorship, influence and the text (including those by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Harold Bloom), updating these conversations to include intersectionality specifically, broadly understood to include gendered, racial and other forms of social justice including disability, and the progressive impact of the transmission and transformation of texts. This diverse volume includes discussions of major canonical works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses alongside the recent contemporary literature by authors such as Siri Husvedt and Maggie O’Farrell, as well as theoretical interventions. This volume also engages with how intertextuality can facilitate interdisciplinary and ekphrastic thinking and representation, as the inspiration of music and the visual arts for texts and their transmission is addressed. The choice of intertexts become deliberately political, ethical and artistic signifiers for the authors discussed in this volume, and our contributors are thus enabled to address topics ranging from visual impairment to Shakespearean motherhood to the influence of Jazz culture on writing on the Northern Irish Troubles.

Flann O'Brien and the Nonhuman is the first book to explore in detail the author's interest in the agency, materiality, and potential sentience of environments, animals and machines. At every turn, O'Brien's writing challenges anthropocentric values and troubles conventional notions of the human. We think of the cast of At Swim-Two-Birds (which features the bird-man Sweeney, a Pooka, and a cow who is called as a star witness in the author's trial) and The Third Policeman's uncanny topographies and atomic hybridisation of people and bicycles, as well as the rain-soaked landscapes, Irish-speaking pigs, and human-seals of An B al Bocht. Yet, O'Brien's deconstruction of conventional narratives of the human-nonhuman binary extends across genres, from the protagonist's strange metamorphosis into a train in the short story 'John Duffy's Brother' to Cruiskeen Lawn's steam men; from O'Brien's stage adaptation of the Capeks' Insect Play to the donkey's tragedy in his late-career teleplay The Man with Four Legs. Drawing on a wide range of methodologies (ecocriticism, the blue humanities, animal studies, cyborg theory, disability studies, posthumanism), paradigms (the Anthropocene, climate change) and theorists (Derrida, Serres, Ngai, Deleuze, Guattari, Braidotti, Saltes, Morton), the contributors unearth new historical contexts for the study of O'Brien, including the long-term impact of the Great Famine, the use of coercive emergency powers during the 1930s and the biopolitical role of air during the Second World War. These interventions not only bring new dimensions of O'Brien's work to the surface, but reveal him as a key but overlooked figure for understanding the role of the nonhuman in Irish modernist cultural production.

Rather than simply proposing or applying new methodologies, it historicises and reconceives the critical assumptions that have shaped scholarly approaches to these works for over half a century, showing that non-fiction as a categorical distinction, no matter how sensible it appears, crumbles under closer inspection.

It explores how connections between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture seem particularly inextricable where the death penalty is at stake, analysing a range of forms including major works of canonical literature, detective fiction, plays, polemics, criminological and psychoanalytic tracts and letters and memoirs.

It explores how connections between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture seem particularly inextricable where the death penalty is at stake, analysing a range of forms including major works of canonical literature, detective fiction, plays, polemics, criminological and psychoanalytic tracts and letters and memoirs.