ABSTRACT
“Mid-century Malaise and Desublimation in Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Kate O'Brien, and Edna O'Brien” examines mid- to late-century representations of Ireland's prehistory and folklore as well as the recurring manifestations of the other in Irish writing. The desublimation at the center of the fragile social and cultural conditions in Ireland from the late 1930s to the early 1960s becomes clear through linked motifs of departure from Ireland, frequently to Britain, entrapment both in Ireland and abroad, with a reunion with or return to Irish life revealing profound disappointment. The banalities of Irish life become negotiated through an anxiety attendant to the intersection with global others as well as the framework of gender, the latter particularly so with women writers. Ireland's past and the Revival are ridiculed and undermined. Ireland, in a peculiar position after independence and the censorship-driven, occluded traumas of the Second World War, becomes a location of artistic and social repression.
