Edna O'Brien: New Critical Perspectives

The essays collected in Edna O’Brien: New Critical Perspectives illustrate the range, complexity and interest of O’Brien as a fiction writer and dramatist. Together they contribute to a broader appreciation of her work and to an evolution of new critical approaches, as well as igniting greater interest in the many unexplored areas of her considerable oeuvre.
The contributors, who include new and established scholars in the field of O’Brien criticism, are Rebecca Pelan, Maureen O’Connor, Michelle Woods, Bertrand Cardin, Ann Norton, Eve Stoddard, Michael Harris, Loredana Salis, Shirley Peterson, Patricia Coughlan, Sinéad Mooney, and Mary Burke.

The Editors: Kathryn Laing teaches in the Department of English at NUI, Galway, having held an IRCHSS Post-Doctoral Fellowship there from 2000 to 2002. She is the editor of The Sentinel (2002), an early unfinished novel by Rebecca West, and she has essays forthcoming in two collections on West: ‘Rebecca West Today’, ed. Bernard Schweizer and ‘Rebecca West’s Fiction and Non-Fiction’, eds Gill Davies, David Malcolm, and John Simons. She has also given research papers and published several articles on other women writers, including Virginia Woolf and Angela Carter.
Sinéad Mooney is a graduate of University College Cork (B.A., M.A.) and the University of Oxford (M.St., D.Phil.), and has been a lecturer in the Department of English, NUI Galway, since 2002. She is the author of Samuel Beckett (2006) and of a number of essays and articles on Beckett. Her other publications include essays on Irish women’s writing, including work on Molly Keane, Kate O’Brien, Edna O’Brien, and Elizabeth Bowen. She is currently working on a study of Beckett and translation, as well as various shorter projects, among them an essay on Edna O’Brien and the short story for the Blackwell Companion to the Irish and British Short Story (2006).
Maureen O’Connor is an IRCHSS Government of Ireland Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Human Settlement and Historical Change, National University of Ireland, Galway, where she is working on a study of nineteenth-century Irish feminism. She is co-editor, with Tadhg Foley, of India and Ireland: Culture, Colonies, and Empire (2006) and, with Lisa Colletta, of Wild Colonial Girl: Essays on Edna O’Brien. (2006)