Book News: Exploring Flann O'Brien's dark comedy

 Flann O’Brien: Gallows Humour

EDITED BY RUBEN BORG AND PAUL FAGAN

Cork University Press, 2020

ISBN: 9781782054214

https://www.corkuniversitypress.com/Flann-O-Brien-p/9781782054214.htm

The essays collected in this volume draw unprecedented critical attention to the centrality of politics in Flann O’Brien’s art. The organizing theme of Gallows Humour focuses these inquiries onto key encounters between the body and the law, between death and the comic spirit in the author’s canon. 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.

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Ruben Borg is associate professor and chair of the department of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Prior to Gallows Humour, he co-edited two volumes on Flann O’Brien for Cork University Press: Contesting Legacies (with Paul Fagan and Werner Huber: 2014), and Problems with Authority (with Paul Fagan and John McCourt: 2017).

Paul Fagan is senior scientist at Salzburg University, as well as a lecturer at the University of Vienna and co-founder of the Vienna Irish Studies and Cultural Theories Summer School. As well as co-editing the Cork University Press collections Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies (2014) and Flann O’Brien: Problems with Authority (2017), Fagan is a co-founder of the International Flann O’Brien Society and is presently completing a monograph on the Irish Literary Hoax Tradition.