Description
Book SynopsisSince the publication of their first controversial novels in the 1950s and 1960s, Philip Roth and Edna O'Brien have always argued against the isolation of mind from body, autobiography from fiction, life from art, and self from nation. In this book Dan O'Brien investigates these shared concerns of the two authors.
Trade ReviewExceptional, original . . . O’Brien takes on a fascinating topic about which very little has been written and, in so doing, makes a valuable contribution to the growing corpus of books in the emergent field of Irish-Jewish studies.
O'Brien's
Fine Meshwork interlaces intricately the works, lives and preoccupations of two (variously) misunderstood contemporary writers so as to ask questions that go beyond considerations of nation and biography. O'Brien's carefully and playfully written study, with its bold thesis of flirtatious intertextuality, will do much to advance their cause, while offering new and exciting frameworks against which to consider Irish and Jewish-American literature both as separate entities and in relation to transnational and transatlantic studies.
