Edna O'Brien and the Art of Fiction / / Maureen O'Connor.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2021 English
• VerfasserIn: O'Connor, Maureen,
• Place / Publishing House: Lewisburg, PA : : Bucknell University Press, , [2021]; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Series: Contemporary Irish Writers
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (200 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Preface and Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Edna O’Brien, Leader of the Banned -- 1 Anti-Oedipal Desires -- 2 The Liberating Sadomasochism of Things -- 3 The Ungrammatical Sublime -- 4 Otherworldly Possessions -- 5 Myth and Mutation -- 6 Disorder, Dirt, and Death -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index