A Tale of Two Tales: Irony, Identity and the Fictions of Anthony Cronin and Brian O’Nolan

Abstract

This essay examines two novels by Anthony Cronin in order to argue that a tendency towards either proliferation or subtraction determines late Irish modernist aesthetics. Having established that the repetition of material in Cronin's texts indicates a tendency towards subtraction, the essay positions Brian O'Nolan's work within a modernist tradition that favours proliferation, and concludes by arguing that the role irony plays in successful proliferation is problematic for a socialist literary aesthetic.