Supercarnal Productions

Anchoring this chapter is Philip Roth’s London life with Bloom and a set of new friends: Al Alvarez, critic, Harold Pinter, playwright, R. B. Kitaj, painter, Michael Herr, journalist, and Edna O’Brien, novelist. Roth enjoyed a culturally rich and satisfying life with Bloom, while working on The Professor of Desire. But he soon sensed the fraying of his relationship as Bloom became increasingly dependent on her daughter, the opera singer Anna Steiger. He soon began to work on adaptations, principally for Bloom but also for himself: one early attempt was his effort to adapt Eugenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind, her Gulag autobiography. Another, new development was Roth’s involvement with Janet Hobhouse, novelist, their affair transposed to The Counterlife. And by the late 1970s, Roth turned to the experiences of an isolated writer in the countryside and the impact of the Holocaust through the possible afterlife of Anne Frank expressed in The Ghost Writer. Roth’s relationship with the New Yorker editor Veronica Geng and the continued importance of his editor Aaron Asher are also formidable figures. Comments on Roth’s enigmatic relationship with his mother (who died suddenly in 1981) end the chapter but not before a detailed accounting of Roth’s many illnesses (including a 1989 quintuple bypass) and the debilitating impact of illness on his physical and mental health.

Becoming a Legend: Edna O’Brien and Her Life-Long Journey

The publication of Germaine Greer’s The Change: Women, Aging and the Menopause presents a manifesto for women’s emancipation and their imminent embarkment on the avenue of freedom towards the liberation from the male gaze. In a similar vein, Edna O’Brien, a pioneer of the literary treatment of female agency and sexuality in the Irish literary canon, moves past the age when women enjoy visibility. Age liberates O’Brien from her entrapment in the public persona and her anxious relationship with the public opinion. It has the power to enhance the possibility of women’s difference. Nowadays, the commitment to women’s cause, the inherent element of O’Brien’s narratives, continues to mark out the uncompromising discourse of transgression of the standard as well as her vigilant condemnation of violence against women. In time, O’Brien has become both a foremother author and a legend. She has embraced her unrepressed femininity and the personification of a female sage that Irish women writers have long lacked and may thus represent a role model for authors who wish to transgress the discriminatory standards and defend the female voice.

Irish Literary Cinema

This chapter examines the adaptation of Irish literary fiction for the screen over the past century. The discussion addresses three main aspects of this theme, beginning with the influence of the cinema and cinema-going on authors as recorded in their memoirs and literary output, and the influence of cinematic form on narrative structure, the latter being most evident in the later work of James Joyce. A second strand examines notions of female agency as they are refracted through the lens of the migrant experience in the novels of Edna O’Brien, Maeve Binchy, and Colm Tóibín. Finally, the post-independence legacy, as depicted in adaptations of the novels and short stories of John McGahern and William Trevor in particular, is discussed as a means of revealing the predicament of those psychically frozen during a time of economic, social, and cultural stagnation.

Edna O’Brien and the Politics of Belatedness

This chapter explores the politics and poetics of Irish female belatedness in Edna O’Brien’s work, career, and critical reception, examining in particular her representation of Irish female maturation, her place in Irish literary history, and her frequent use of intertextuality. It explains that, although O’Brien is in many ways a literary pioneer, not least in being the first postcolonial female writer of rural Irish Catholic background to achieve international prominence, in other ways her work and career are emblematic of a kind of belatedness. Her first novel was among the last to be banned in Ireland, she writes about female subjects struggling to be included in the Irish social and symbolic orders, and her work has been criticized for being derivative of earlier writers, particular James Joyce. Only in recent years, as Irish society has itself radically changed, has O’Brien come, belatedly, to be seen as a major author.

Edna O’Brien The Country Girls (1960): Deconstructing the Irish Women’s Myth

The rigid cultural and political environment of the 1940s post-independence era in Ireland placed a significant limitation on women by socially constructing and consistently implementing a strictly-defined Irish Catholic female identity. Over time, women could no longer stand this situation, and movements for women’s rights were set up. Political, social as well as cultural transformations in the country were accompanied by a necessarily urgent literary reaction, especially by female writers. Edna O’Brien, one of the most loved, and influential Irish women writers, published her first novel, The Country Girls (1960). She helped open discussion of the role of women and sex in Irish society and of Roman Catholicism’s persecution upon women. The present paper intends to focus on Irish women through The Country Girls. It explores the conflicts and compromises of Irish woman identity as this has been represented in the 20th-century Irish literature; concerning the more generalized categories of society, nation, and religion.