Brendan Behan: Cultural Nationalism and the Revisionist Writer (New Literary Studies)

This book offers a major reassessment of the work of Brendan Behan (1923-64), author of The Quare Fellow, The Hostage and Borstal Boy. It charts Behan's intellectual journey from his early imitations of Republican verse and song to his formulation of a literature that could articulate and convey a thoroughly postcolonial, critical nationalism. Brendan Behan moves beyond the popular image of Behan as a stage-Irish rebel and presents his writings as complex representations of the construction and negotiation of identity and culture. Behan's plays, stories, autobiographies, poems and newspaper columns, composed in mid-century Ireland, explore the bonds of language, class, religion, colonialism and nationalism. This book argues that Behan's work expands the anti-colonial project of Irish revival writings to articulate a revisionist critique of post-independence Irish nationalism. Behan's writings engage in inter-textual dialogue with the writings of Hyde, Synge, O'Casey, Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce, to fashion from them his critical, comic interrogations of cultural nationalism.