Fine meshwork : Philip Roth, Edna O'Brien, and Jewish-Irish literature

Resource Information

The work Fine meshwork : Philip Roth, Edna O'Brien, and Jewish-Irish literature represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in San Francisco Public Library. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Fine meshwork : Philip Roth, Edna O'Brien, and Jewish-Irish literature

Title remainder

Philip Roth, Edna O'Brien, and Jewish-Irish literature

Statement of responsibility

Dan O'Brien

Creator

• O'Brien, Dan

Contributor

• hoopla digital

Author

• O'Brien, Dan

Subject

• Electronic books
• English literature -- Irish authors | History and criticism
• American literature -- Jewish authors | History and criticism
• Roth, Philip -- Criticism and interpretation
• O'Brien, Edna -- Criticism and interpretation
• Comparative literature -- Irish and Jewish

Language

eng

Summary

In a 1984 interview with longtime friend Edna O'Brien, Philip Roth describes her writing as "a piece of fine meshwork, a net of perfectly observed sensuous details that enables you to contain all the longing and pain and remorse that surge through the fiction." The phrase "fine meshwork" can apply not only to O'Brien's writing but also to the connective threads that bind her work to others', including, most illuminatingly, Roth's. Since the publication of their first controversial novels in the 1950s and 1960s, Roth and O'Brien have always argued against the isolation of mind from body, autobiography from fiction, life from art, and self from nation. In Fine Meshwork, Dan O'Brien investigates the shared concerns of these two authors, now regarded as literary icons in their home countries. He traces their fifty-year literary friendship and the striking parallels in their books and reception, bringing together what, at first glance, seem to be quite disparate milieus: the largely feminist and Irish scholarship on O'Brien with Jewish and American perspectives on Roth. In doing so, and in considering them in a transnational context, he argues that the intertwined nature of their writing symbolizes the far-ranging symbiosis between Irish literature and its American-particularly Jewish American-counterpart

Cataloging source

Midwest

Dewey number

820.9/9415

Index

no index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

dictionaries

Series statement

Irish studies

Target audience

adult