Eimar O'Duffy

Robert Hogan

1972
84 pages
ISBN 0-8387-7755-4
Irish Writers Series

Eimar O'Duffy is another outstanding contribution to the Irish Writers Series. These monographs have been designed to treat in individual volumes the significant Anglo-Irish writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. The Studies will prove helpful to both literary scholars and to students of literature. When complete the series will constitute a significant history of modern Anglo-Irish literature, and will encompass discussions of more than 50 writers.

The present volume treats in detail the literary career of a major Irish satirist whose works today are almost entirely neglected, even in Ireland. A poet, a playwright and a novelist, O'Duffy's first notable achievement was his long, autobiographical political novel, The Wasted Island, which took the unpopular stance of criticizing the Easter Rising.

His masterpiece, however, was a mythical, science-fiction, satiric fantasy in three volumes, his Candice Trilogy. This length work, completed despite poverty and ill health, is a richly comic indictment of politics, economics and social pretensions in Ireland and in the modern world. Through close critical analysis, Robert Hogan shows how its finest volumes, King Goshawk and the Birds and The Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street, are in the great Irish satirical tradition of Swift and Shaw.

About the author:

Robert Hogan was born in Missouri in 1930. He has his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri (1956). He has taught at Purdue, Ohio University, the University of Rochester, University College, Dublin, the University of California at Davis, and is presently Professor of English at the University of Delaware. His literary output includes The Experiments of Sean O'Casey, Arthur Miller, The Independence of Elmer Rice, After the Irish Renaissance, Dion Boucicault, and Eimar O'Duffy.