the tension between formal conservatism and experimentalism: Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two Birds

Their longer works may be thus seen as attempts to recreate those missing novels. The original or the working title of The Waste Land was “He Do The Police In Different Voices”, which is borrowed from Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, which is as instance of the English comic novel and in Bakhtin’s view central to the history of the development because it is ‘externally very vivid and at the same time historically profound’. Its epigraph is meanwhile borrowed from Petronius’ Satyricon, a work which Bakhtin regards as the fount of novelistic prose coming together. The novels in the modern period also seems to be taking on the characteristics of poetry, the modern novelistic heroes spend their time in staring at lighthouses (Woolf), whiling way the time permutating on their biscuits on grass (Beckett).

Cahalan, in The Irish Novel, traces the tendency of Irish writers such as Swift, Edgeworth and Maturin to employ fantastic elements and non-realism in direct opposition to English colonial models and in affirmation of certain Irish traditions. Mercier, in The Irish Comic Tradition, points also to the presence of exaggeration, absurdity and scatological detail in Gaelic heroic cycles and poetry. In Flann O'Brien, Bakhtin, and Menippean Satire, M. Keith Booker begins by saying; "It has now become commonplace to think of Flann O'Brien along with James Joyce and Samuel Beckett as the three great Irish fiction writers...

Irony takes many forms in literature, but regardless of the form, it is defined by incongruence between what is presented and what actually is. Graham Greene’s short story, The Destructors, first published in 1954, is often viewed as commercial fiction due to its frequent use of action and suspense to draw readers in. It does however incorporate literary elements that could allow it to be categorized as literary fiction to an extent. The presence of irony, particularly irony of situation, in The Destructors is a literary characteristic that serves to add suspense to the plot by revealing the opposite of what the reader expects. Situational irony appears countless times in Graham’s short story.

Romanticism "In spite of its representation of potentially diabolical and satanic powers, its historical and geographic location and its satire on extreme Calvinism, James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner proves to be a novel that a dramatises a crisis of identity, a theme which is very much a Romantic concern." Discuss. Examination of Romantic texts provides us with only a limited and much debated degree of commonality. However despite the disparity of Romanticism (or Romanticisms) as a movement it would be true to say that a prevalent aspect of Romantic literature that unites many different forms of the movement, is a concern with the divided self. As the empirical Rationalism of the eighteenth century was partially subverted by the subjective metaphysical reflection in the nineteenth artists tended to examine wider issues from an introspective starting point.

This is due in part to the huge importance that is given to the use of language in contemporary descriptions and estimations of literature. Ironies and paradoxes seem to reflect and embody the sorts of linguistic rebellion, innovation, deviation, and play, that have throughout this century become the dominant criteria of literary value. The explicit association of irony with paradox, and of both with literature, is often ascribed to the New Criticism, and more specifically to Cleanth Brooks. Brooks, however, used the two terms in a manner that was unconventional, even eccentric. He seemed to think of irony as a principle of order and unity: not so much a feature of language or meaning as a sort of coherence yoking disparate elements together, rather like Aristotle's conception of wholeness and integrity in Poetics 8 (Brooks 1951).

There seems to be a worrying pattern for the genre fiction authors that have gained mainstream appeal but lost control of their craft afterwards. But if anything, the forms of popular fiction have become the place for the more serious scholarly questions where the boundaries becomes increasingly endless to the writers. Despite the fact that “fantasy fiction is an alternative to realist fiction, not the alternative, they are nonetheless viewed as opposites, if not opponents” (Wilkins, 273). An author is the “meaning maker”, that recognises the purpose of writing and to construct and communicate a specific message between the author and the reader. For the author, popular fiction offers a wide range of freedom in style of writing that the literary fiction simply no longer does.

I think an understanding of this (self-subverting) form has some important and complicated implications for a reading of Absalom, Absalom!, especially in terms of the relationship of historicity to orality in the novel, and of its distinctive and relatively homogeneous prose style. Ultimately to be found in these themes are the novel's fantasies of its form and of its reader. The new aesthetic defines itself in relationship to an implied old one which, because of some historical break ("Then the theatre was changed/to something else"), no longer works. If Absalom, Absalom!, formally and thematically, offers a substitute for a now-inadequate "souvenir," it may be necessary to begin its exploration with the souvenir itself: namely the communication of positive historical truth in fixed form. Many critical interpretations of Absalom, Absalom!

It goes without saying that every work in literature is unique. The way that certain novels, novellas, or poems go about accentuating certain themes or points, whether of grand nature or of little consequence to society, is certainly achieved through a concoction of literary styles. The most enduring and effective works of literature exhibit an artful combination of literary device and aforementioned technique. Without a doubt, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four exhibits such a blend of style through characteristics of a dystopian novel and satire. Orwell lived in a time when the spread of communism, mostly unbeknownst to his audience, posed an unimaginable threat to freedom.

Search for Meaning in James Joyce's Dubliners Throughout Dubliners James Joyce deliberately effaces the traditional markers of the short story: causality, closure, etc. In doing so, "the novel continually offers up texts which mark their own complexity by highlighting the very thing which traditional realism seeks to conceal: the artifice and insufficiency inherent in a writer's attempt to represent reality. (Seidel 31)" By refusing to take a reductive approach towards the world(s) he presents on the page - to offer up "meaning" or "ending" - Joyce moves the reader into complex and unsettling epistemological and ontological realms. Meaning is no longer unitary and prescriptive, the author will not reveal (read impose) what the story "means" at its close and therefore we can't definitively "know" anything about it. Instead, meaning, like modernism, engenders its own multiplicity in Joyce's works, diffuses into something necessarily plural: meanings.

Running parallel to the Revivalist Movement was a similar Irish Language Movement, which publicized texts and narratives focused on professedly Gaelic subjects. Groups focused on the task propped up Irish warriors and heroes as role models, figures of manhood and moral virtue, which added further to the re-evaluation of contemporary Irish identity around this time. Opposing the Cultural Protectionists who would preserve an “Irish” Ireland, ... ... middle of paper ... ...he Novel: Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds.” Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Summer, 1993), pp.