Fine Meshwork: Philip Roth, Edna O'Brien, and Jewish-Irish Literature (Irish Studies) - Softcover

O'Brien, Dan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0815636393 ISBN 13: 9780815636397

Publisher: Syracuse University Press, 2019

Synopsis

<p>In a 1984 interview with longtime friend Edna O’Brien, Philip Roth describes her writing as "a piece of fine meshwork, a net of perfectly observed sensuous details that enables you to contain all the longing and pain and remorse that surge through the fiction." The phrase "fine meshwork" can apply not only to O’Brien’s writing but also to the connective threads that bind her work to others’, including, most illuminatingly, Roth’s.<br><br>Since the publication of their first controversial novels in the 1950s and 1960s, Roth and O’Brien have always argued against the isolation of mind from body, autobiography from fiction, life from art, and self from nation. In <i>Fine Meshwork,</i> Dan O’Brien investigates the shared concerns of these two authors, now regarded as literary icons in their home countries. He traces their fifty-year literary friendship and the striking parallels in their books and reception, bringing together what, at first glance, seem to be quite disparate milieus: the largely feminist and Irish scholarship on O’Brien with Jewish and American perspectives on Roth. In doing so, and in considering them in a transnational context, he argues that the intertwined nature of their writing symbolizes the far-ranging symbiosis between Irish literature and its American—particularly Jewish American—counterpart.</p>

About this title

About the Author

<b>Dan O’Brien </b> is currently an Irish Research Council postdoctoral fellow at University College Dublin. He is a coeditor of <i>Irish Questions and Jewish Questions: Crossovers in Culture.</i>

Edition details

• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0815636393
• ISBN 13: 9780815636397
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 277