Flann O’Brien

The second edition of this thorough study of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman essentially updates the 1995 edition with additions rather than changes to Keith Hopper’s initial argument. The Third Policeman, Hopper argues, is O’Brien’s masterpiece, and its status as a meta-fiction defines O’Brien as a post-modernist author. Hopper starts with a contextual reminder of O’Brien’s difficult position as a writer, in between Yeats’s Celtic Twilight and the subsequent Irish naturalist tradition, o..