ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 sees Howard's work viewed as popular as opposed to literary, which means it has had little academic critical attention. It offers an account of how Howard's writing works by satirising the real Ireland in his fictive Ireland, and the satirical perspective comes as we shuttle back and forth between these. This is read through two theoretical concepts, Martin Heidegger's Augenblick, that ‘fulfilled moment’, that moment of vision, when we can see the full and complete interpenetration of both the satirical writing and the object of that satirical writing, and Pierre Bourdieu's notion of metanoia, which he sees as crucial to reflexive thinking about culture.
