Ireland Through the Looking Glass explores O’Nolan’s broad-ranging humor (as novelist and newspaper columnist) in its cultural contexts. What emerges from this fresh perspective is an
original portrait of him as a writer whose work was at once in conflict with, and wholly indebted tom, the charged cultural politics of the new state.
This is the first book to thoroughly combine both aspects of his literary career, illuminating how his episodic novels relate to the journalism which he wrote throughout his life. It
demonstrates how his recurrent preoccupation with the persona and role of the author was as much shaped by the difficult position of the Irish writer in the 1930s and 1940s as it was by
literary modernism. Each chapter within the book focuses on a different aspect of O’Nolan’s multi-faceted career, charting his development from a playful literary humorist to a peculiarly
astute cultural critic.
This is the first book to demonstrate in detail what O’Nolan’s varying blend of parody, satire and surreal humor owed to the peculiar cultural climate of the mid-twentieth century Ireland. By
exploring the links between comedy and culture, it exposes the humorist’s curiously ambivalent response to the culture of the new state, and particularly to the position of the writer within
it.
