Price: €39.00
Add to BagFlann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, completed in 1940, was initially rejected by his publishers for being ‘too fantastic’, and only appeared posthumously in 1967. Since then O’Brien has achieved cult status, although critical appraisal of his work has focused almost exclusively on his first novel, At Swim Two Birds (1939). By 1940 O’Brien was confronted with two towering traditions: the jaded legacy of Yeats’s Celtic Twilight and the problematic complexities of Joyce’s modernism. With The Third Policeman O’Brien forges a powerful synthesis between these two traditions, and the paraliterary path he chooses marks the historical transition from modernism to post-modernism.
This groundbreaking study, first published in 1995 and now substantially revised, reconfigures O’Brien as a highly subversive writer within a rich and fertile literary landscape: indisputably Irish yet distinctly post-modern. It identifies The Third Policeman as a subversive intellectual satire, in the cutting-edge tradition of Swift and Sterne, and situates it as one of the earliest – and most exciting – examples of post-modernist fiction.
Hardback 2nd edn: 2009
Printed Pages: 192pp
Size: 234 x 156mm
ISBN: 9781859184479
Related Products
Book Reviews
Joseph Brooker, Modernism/modernity
July 5, 2010, 13:15 pm
The Third Policeman cannot yet have met a more dedicated academic reader, and Hopper’s exploration of its many oddities is tireless and resourceful
Mark O’Connell, Irish Studies Review
December 14, 2009, 9:16 am
‘This is, overall, a persuasive and highly illuminating work of criticism. What is more noteworthy, though, is that it is actually a very enjoyable one. Hopper’s enthusiasm for his subject is everywhere apparent. [...] With A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-modernist, Keith Hopper has achieved what all good criticism sets out to do: he sends us back, with a reshaped frame of reference and a renewed sense of purpose, to the work of this enigmatic novelist’.
Books Ireland
November 27, 2009, 16:01 pm
This book is a superb academic dismantling of O'Nolan's novels.
R. R. Joly, CHOICE Reviews Online
October 29, 2009, 17:42 pm
In this second edition of a work first published in 1995, Hopper offers new critical scholarship and an expanded bibliography while maintaining his contention that O’Brien can be properly assessed only as an early progenitor of postmodernism. Hopper succeeds splendidly, displaying an impressive acumen for poststructuralist analysis [...]. This study is impressive, even brilliant, in its scope, thoroughness, mastery, and persuasiveness. Not to be missed is its clear delineation of postmodernism as a valid and defined literary approach. Summing Up: Highly recommended’
David Malcolm, Times Literary Supplement
October 29, 2009, 17:42 pm
Hopper is a good explicator, his approach is illuminating and such enthusiasm for Flann O’Brien is infectious
J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine
May 1, 2009, 18:37 pm
‘The highest praise I can give a critical book is that it makes me want to read or re-read the works discussed. Keith Hopper’s book on Flann O’Brien does that. He makes reading Flann O’Brien sound like an exciting and productive thing to do’.
Rüdiger Imhof, Irish Times
May 1, 2009, 13:44 pm
‘Hopper makes his point with enviable ingenuity and pervasive force. He wears his stupendous erudition and expertise lightly and writes in a style that is sheer delight. […] Hopper has managed that rarest of feats: a scientific study from which both the expert and the layman can profit copiously’. (Rüdiger Imhof, Irish Times)
