Flann O'Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-Modernist

Flann 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.