Brian o nolan biography of william butler

Anne Clissmann : Flann O'Brien. A Critical Introduction to his Writings. The « post- renaissance » scene in fictional writing has, not always to the best of been dominated, for critics, by O'Faolain, O'Flaherty, and O'Connor Joyce, of course, excepted , a group of writers, that is, whom O'Nolan despised for their cosy « realism » — « wee Annie going to her first confession , stuff about country funerals ».

Because of O'Nolan's family background, the historical setting, and the fact that he was one of the few.

The neglect in giving O'Nolan his due as an important novelist partly stems from the fact that his first, and probably his best, novel was originally published in , for political reasons not a good year to attract much attention. When At Swim-Two-Birds was re-issued in , the combined endeavours of critics and novelists in England « to run avant-garde or experimental writing out of town » William Cooper , which, more often than one could wish for, resulted in foolish and naive attacks on anything that smacked of the Joycean or Woolfian way of writing, were in full swing.

Pertaining to the experimental class of novel-writing and, in fact, parodying the « realistic » novel that a host of critics were advocating and, at least in England, most novelists were practising, At Swim was bound to fail a second time. As Timothy Hilton quite rightly asserted, At Swim has been one of those books doomed to an underground existence, « the of isolated bunches of cognoscenti » New Statesman — 8 Dec.

Miss Clissmann's study, the first to cover the entire O'Nolan oeuvre, will unquestionably contribute in a competent manner to introducing the writings to a wider public ; it remains doubtful, however, whether the book has ultimately succeeded in truly revaluating O'Nolan's literary achievement. Miss Clissmann is at her best in the first three chapters.

William Butler Yeats (13 June – 28 January ) was an Irish poet.

Her biography provides a number of useful and fascinating insights into the character of O'Nolan, who, hiding himself behind a dozen of pseudonyms, managed to remain an enigma. The account of his time as a student at UCD and of his activities in the Literary and Historical Society makes interesting reading. Miss Clissmann treats the period after , when O'Nolan was plagued and hampered in his literary activities by a series of accidents and illnesses, with due discretion ; sometimes, perhaps, with too much discretion, for it remains unclear what kind of accidents these were and what the illnesses consisted in.

Miss Clissmann argues that O'Nolan's suffering was largely responsible for the change of personality that O'Nolan underwent after If that is so, it would be important to disclose the causes for the change in personality in more precise terms than by resorting to euphemistic explanations of O'Nolan's own fabrication. Later he exploited these subjects and developed his technique, when he came to work for The Irish Times and as Myles na gCopaleen wrote his Cruiskeen Lawn columns chp.