For nearly twenty-six years, Brian O’Nolan wrote “Cruiskeen Lawn” in the Irish Times under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen. The column has often been regarded as a distraction for O’Nolan—one that kept him from writing more novels or plays. Yet characteristics of his work across genres and stages of his life (such as his use of pseudonyms) began in his experiments within newspapers. As a student at University College, Dublin, he wrote for the student publication Comhthrom Féinn, and later began his own satirical paper, Blather. Our study and understanding of “Cruiskeen Lawn” is fundamental to our understanding of O’Nolan as an author across literary forms, topics, and periods.   The translation of “Cruiskeen Lawn” from the expanse of a newspaper page to an edition or to a dissertation is itself a form of editorial emendation. This dissertation, bound with its own set of constraints and rules, cannot fix this. Yet it will aim to consider the gains and losses of how we collect O’Nolan’s column. This dissertation has four chapters. The first relates the story of how O’Nolan came to writing through newspapers, how he came to write in the Irish Times, and how his relationship with the paper changed over time. A chronology includes the events in O’Nolan’s own life that pertain to his newspaper writing and work under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen. It gives readers a holistic sense of the columns by placing them in the broader context of his life and includes end notes with references to his papers. The catalogue accounts for every “Cruiskeen Lawn” article O’Nolan published and it serves as the first document that consolidates this information. The edition comprises forty “Cruiskeen Lawn” articles. Annotations focus on tracing O’Nolan’s references to other articles and papers in order to open investigative pathways toward those sources and to show how richly the column borrowed from other media. / 2019-08-09T00:00:00Z

Irish author Brian O'Nolan's (1911-1966) later career involves multi-media works that in a variety of ways challenge Ireland to be more open to the complications of modernity. These controversial works have too often been dismissed as pedestrian and unsophisticated, though they offer themselves as experiments in different media, involving technologies that were recent developments in Ireland. Looking at his later fiction, journalism, and television writings reveals that O'Nolan continued his commitment to complexity throughout his entire career. O'Nolan's experiments take many forms, including the fragmented identities of Flann O'Brien and Myles na gCopaleen, portraying an author who embraces modernity when many in the country advocated provincial lore. He is open to modernity because he seeks positions among Ireland's emerging modern and nascent provincial voices in multiple narratives. These multiple positions are located in verbal and visual forms, multiple personas, and multiple genres--including new media--where he crosses boundaries of artistic media by including visual representations in his written experiments published and broadcast in new media. I combine Cultural and New Modernist Studies in an approach that labels O'Nolan a "bad" modernist because his multi-media and multi-genre works are precise and premeditated experiments in cosmopolitan as well as regional modernity. Moreover, I contend this "bad" modernist's later works can be reexamined as one form of Ireland's modernist culture, helping to bridge the transition from colony to emerging global power. Chapter one starts with persona Flann O'Brien's last novel, Slattery's Sago Saga (1965-1966), which is an appropriate beginning because its multiple narratives are extended to a broader, transatlantic audience, that of America. The novel also adopts an ambivalent female character that reappears, almost simultaneously, as a straightforward, confident female voice in the multi-episode television series, Th'Oul Lad of Kilsalaher (1965). Since O'Brien's works can be troubled by misogynistic tendencies, studying a later novel that complicates preconceived patterns about women helps readdress criticisms of the writer. Two interchapters also depict O'Brien's diverse experiments and positions in both well-known and obscure locales, anticipating shifts in more refined writings. The first of these analyzes O'Brien's early experiments in visual form, such as cartoons in childhood and college endeavors and doodles in the unpublished, first manuscript of At Swim-Two-Birds. In chapter two, the Cruiskeen Lawn columns, written under the Myles persona, mark a new form of journalism that uses intersections of verbal monologue and found illustrations to form its jokes. This word and image debate is made humorous by old trade magazine illustrations being recycled as new etchings, and this compounds the literary forgery evident throughout O'Nolan's career. Additionally, Myles' new journalism can be considered public art because The Irish Times where the columns are circulated is a natural arena of debate. A second interchapter hints at O'Nolan's part in shaping public thinking while offering his talents for pay. These experimental sketches show the "bad" modernist in O'Nolan when he tries to sell his Myles identity to Irish businesses like the Irish Hospital Sweepstakes, Guinness, and Whiskey Distilleries as a viable brand (a satirist who combines visual material with current and historical events) in the commercial market, even when the archives remain ambiguous. Finally, chapter three focuses on Myles' writings in television, and it is in Th'Oul Lad of Kilasalaher that a confident, modern female voice first emerges in his writing career. I compare his early, full-length television plays, which are often formulaic and transferable to other modern nations, to the multi-episode series, O'Dea's Yer Man and Th'Oul Lad of Kilasalaher, in part to reveal his pioneering role in developing a new form of modernity for Ireland; that he wants them to remain open to independent ideas rather than forcing on them a prevalent and predominant form of modernism. In the epilogue, I compare O'Nolan's modernist experiments to Anne Enright's parallel and contemporary work The Wig My Father Wore (1995).

This study examines how The Times and The Irish Times framed the Anglo-Irish War from September to December 1920. The research question explores how the British and Irish press framed the Anglo-Irish War based on political and national affiliations. The purpose of the paper is to contribute to an understanding of how the newspapers chose to frame the war based on their own interests and perspectives. The military-historical interest lies in understanding the role of the media in war and how they influence the reader’s perceptions of the war and its participants. The source material used consists of 14 newspaper editions from The Times and 15 from The Irish Times between September 1st and December 31st, 1920. The sources are digitized primary materials obtained from the newspapers’ online archives. To analyse the material, the method of qualitative text analysis has been employed, involving careful reading to identify trends in the newspapers. Combined with the method, the framing theory has been applied to interpret frames in relation to the newspapers’ political stance and national identity. Previous research indicates that the newspapers were not objective observers of the war, but through their critical reporting, influenced public opinion and the outcome of the war. This study demonstrates that The Times and The Irish Times framed the war and its participants differently, thereby creating different versions of the reality of the war. The Times focused on British reprisals and emphasized the international reputation of the empire. The Irish Times focused on the IRA and the consequences of their actions for the Irish people. The results are considered relevant today to remind consumers of the media to be critical of sources and aware of media’s framing.