Kate O'Brien

2018 ◽  
pp. 227-243
Author(s):  
Eibhear Walshe
Keyword(s):  
Kate O'brien

No ‘Help to the Imagination’: Kate O'Brien and the Emergency

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-112
Author(s):  
Anna Teekell
Keyword(s):  
Complex Space ◽  
Coercive Power ◽  
Cultural Conservatism ◽  
Kate O'brien ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Love Triangle

Kate O'Brien's 1943 The Last of Summer has been read as the novelist's riposte to an insular island that stifled both her publishing (through censorship) and her imagination (through cultural conservatism). Set on the eve of the neutral ‘Emergency’, O'Brien's sixth novel actually depicts Ireland as a complex space of negotiation, simultaneously desirable and condemnable, that challenges, rather than stifles, the individual imagination. The Last of Summer is a love triangle and a battle of wits, pitching a stage actress, the French ingénue Angèle, against an accomplished domestic performer, her potential mother-in-law, Hannah Kernahan. In the end, it is Hannah who wields ‘neutrality’ – both Ireland's in the war and her pretended neutrality in family matters – as a form of coercive power.

Preface to ‘The Art of Writing’ by Kate O'Brien

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-144
Author(s):  
Christopher Murray
Keyword(s):  
Kate O'brien

Kate O'Brien and Virginia Woolf: Common Ground

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-142
Author(s):  
Aintzane Legarreta Mentxaka
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Political Alignments ◽  
Literary Influences ◽  
Kate O'brien

Convergences in the work of Kate O'Brien and Virginia Woolf range from literary influences and political alignments, to a shared approach to narrative point of view, structure, or conceptual use of words. Common ground includes existentialist preoccupations and tropes, a pacifism which did not hinder support for the left in the Spanish Civil War, the linking of feminism and decolonization, an affinity with anarchism, the identification of the normativity of fascism, and a determination to represent deviant sexualities and affects. Making evident the importance of the connection, O'Brien conceived and designed The Flower of May (1953), one of her most experimental and misunderstood novels, to paid homage to Woolf's oeuvre.

A City She must Postpone: A Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew L. Reznicek
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Kate O'brien ◽  
Women's Novels

This conclusion looks forward into the mid-twentieth-century works of Kate O’Brien in order to demonstrate the ongoing significance of Paris in Irish women’s novels. In three different bildungsromane, her protagonists experience different Parisian spaces. This analysis demonstrates that those spaces ultimately determine the type of Bildung available to those characters.

Kate O'Brien and Peter Francis discuss drugs, their use and misuse.

1996 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-15
Author(s):  
Kate O'Brien ◽  
Peter Francis
Keyword(s):  
Kate O'brien
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document