Thomas Flanagan (1923-2002) was a novelist, scholar, and critic. He was the author of The Irish Novelists, 1800–1850 (1959) and the novels The Year of the French (1979), The Tenants of Time (1988), and The End of the Hunt (1994). »

There You Are

Writings on Irish and American Literature and History

By Thomas Flanagan
Preface by Seamus Heaney
Edited and with an introduction by Christopher Cahill

Thomas Flanagan became famous as the author of a trilogy of novels, starting with The Year of the French, about Ireland from the rebellion of 1798 to the civil war of the 1920s. But the novelist who began by reimagining the mental and physical world of eighteenth-century County Mayo had long been immersing himself, as a scholar, essayist, and reviewer, in the literature and history of his ancestral land.

In the nonfiction writings collected here, many of them unpublished in his lifetime, Flanagan brings what Christopher Cahill calls his "keen eye and strong gaze and sharp tongue" to reassessments of key figures of Irish culture. They range from Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Lord Edward Fitzgerald, through W. B. Yeats and James Joyce, Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Collins, to contemporaries and friends like Brian Moore and Frank O’Connor, and American Irish like the Molly Maguires and the director John Ford.

Flanagan probes the tragically intertwined origins of celebrity and literary modernism in the careers of Irish-American writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O’Neill, and John O’Hara. He reflects on what his own novels have taught him about the possibilities of historical fiction. And his thoughts on Irish-American identity sum up the long-pondered mixture of experience and scrutiny he brought to his heritage.

Witty, lively, and learned, this collection reveals that Thomas Flanagan was not only as a master of the historical novel but a writer who meditated broadly and deeply on the Ireland he once described as "a complex, profound, historical society, woven of many strands, some bright and some dark."

Reviews

A handsome collection of essays... skilfully bonded together to form a cohesive examination of what is recognised as an Irish literary tradition... Scholarly yes, but never dull... Flanagan writes for readers, not for scholars— he's on our side... This is critical writing of the highest order, illuminating and exact.
— The Leeds Guide

[H]ow can you be an American yet helplessly, even ignorantly, sense roots that tug elsewhere?... It could be described as a compulsive search for an unlocateable itch... This bright book might be a slave for all emigrants become immigrants, who reasonably yearn and scratch.
— The Spectator

Thomas Flanagan was an Irish American whose opinions on literature sent a laser beam of acuity through the swathe of commonplace blarney often voiced by the Irish themselves when it came to eulogising their bards. To read this posthumous collection of essays is to encounter his voice afresh: tough-talking, amusing, wry and scholarly... The thinking is lucid, the sentiments sharpened by a moral curiosity and rigour... His easy wit and compassionate perception are paraded unselfconsciously in tributes to fellow authors.
— Scotland on Sunday

Flanagan's essays are unencumbered by the fashionable critical baggage- Theory, Post-Structuralism, whatever you're having yourself- that strives to remove literature from our pleasures and place it among our duties... it's the desire to share both his enthusiasms and his reasons for them that makes him such a companionable critic... Books, of course, were his other friends, and he conveys his love of them in this welcome volume
— Irish Independent

A book testifying to Flanagan's immense gifts... a superb cornucopia of offerings on subjects from Mary McCarthy to the Molly Maguires.
— Sunday Business Post (Irish)

Also see:

The Year of the French By Thomas Flanagan Introduction by Seamus Deane The twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Thomas Flanagan's best-selling novel of the Irish rebellion of 1798. "Thomas Flanagan grants this historic period a new and panoramic life." — Time

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