Edna O'Brien and the Art of Fiction

Since the appearance of her first novel, The Country Girls, in 1960a book that undermined the nations ideal of innocent and pious Irish girlhoodEdna OBrien has provoked controversy in her native Ireland and abroad. Indeed, several of her early novels were condemned by church authorities and banned by the Irish government for their frank portrayals of sexual matters and the inner lives of women. Now an internationally acclaimed writer, OBrien must be critically reassessed for a twenty-first century audience. Edna OBrien and the Art of Fiction provides an urgent retrospective consideration of one of the English-speaking worlds best-selling and most prolific contemporary authors. Drawing on OBriens fiction as well as archival material, and applying new theoretical approachesincluding ecocritical and feminist new materialist readingsthis study considers the pioneering and enduring ways OBrien represents womens experience, family relationships, the natural world, sex, creativity, and death, and her works long anticipation of contemporary movements such as #metoo.