Introduction

The essays collected in this volume draw unprecedented critical attention to the centrality of politics in Flann O’Brien’s art. The organising theme of Gallows humour focuses these inquiries onto key encounters between the body and the law, between death and the comic spirit in the author’s canon. These innovative analyses explore the place of biopolitics in O’Brien’s modernist experimentation and popular writing through reflections on his handling of the thematics of violence, justice, capital punishment, eugenics, prosthetics, skin, prostitution, syphilis, rape, reproduction, illness, auto-immune deficiency, abjection, drinking, Gaelic games and masculinist nationalism across a diverse range of genres, intertexts, contexts.