Flann O'Brien

Recent years have witnessed a series of shifts in the reception of Brian O'Nolan's work, with the publication of collected short stories and dramatic texts and a systematic critical reappraisal of once marginal titles in the author's canon. The vast collections of O'Nolan's correspondence, manuscripts and drafts housed in Illinois, Boston, and Texas, - as well as The Irish Times online digital archive - have given rise to genetic and cultural materialist approaches that seek to explore the borders of authorship and authority in O'Nolan's ever-expanding oeuvre. And while longer-running critical conversations continue to be finessed about the ways in which O'Nolan's texts are shaped by towering twentieth-century figures such as Joyce and Beckett, the increasingly international contexts in which O'Nolan is being read invite us to reconsider his profile as a satirist, a local comedian, a critic of provincial attitudes, a formal innovator and a powerful, inimitable voice in the twentieth-century avant-garde. As the boundaries of his body of work continue to be redrawn, O'Nolan's writing appears to be constantly repositioning itself between local and international perspectives, displayin