Sean O’Faolain (1900-1991) was Ireland’s leading social and political critic in the period following the country’s independence from the United Kingdom. Since his death, scholarly opinion has alternately cast him as an arch-revisionist, a liberal nationalist, and a frustrated republican. The Selected Essays of Sean O’Faolain reassesses his reputation by showing that he wrote in the tradition of post-Enlightenment European intellectuals, and that while he was a significant figure in Ireland, his work extends beyond immediate national concerns. This volume includes over fifty unabridged essays by O’Faolain on a wide range of subjects – from canonical writers to architecture, from religious scandals to economics, from nationalism to internationalism, from long-dead historical figures to recent controversies. O’Faolain’s fearlessness in taking on the major political, cultural, and religious figures of his day, his masterly use of rhetoric, and his intellectual acuity have contributed to his works being quoted often by scholars working across several disciplines. Many of these essays appear here in print for the first time since they were published in the foremost periodicals of their day. An extensive introduction and helpful annotations contextualise and explain them for a new audience. In his re-readings of history and challenges to dominant historiographical trends, O’Faolain has become a pariah to some and a hero to others. The Selected Essays of Sean O’Faolain bridges some of these competing visions, presenting a more complex figure through his varied corpus of writing.

Brad Kent is associate professor of British and Irish literatures at Université Laval.

Brad Kent's profile page

"The Selected Essays "should not simply be seen as museum pieces, fit only for affording a view into another time," Kent concludes his introductory essay. "O'Faolain was the leading Irish public intellectual of his day, and from these pages we can better grasp some of the modes of thought that have shaped the making of contemporary Ireland and the world far beyond its borders." It is an appropriately ambitious claim, and one which is realized time and again in the course of this considered, five-hundred- page book. The reprinting of these essays brings O'Faolain out of the archive and places his work firmly within the reach of contemporary readers of Irish Studies." Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

"In the current 'Mart of Ideas' (to borrow the title of one of Sean O'Faolain's essays), it is easy to lose sight of what it really means to be an engaged public intellectual. These essays, brought together here with care and coherence, offer us a timely reminder of the importance of such figures in fostering vigorous and intelligent debate. In so doing, they restore O'Faolain not simply as a significant figure in his own time, but as one of the precursors of the transformed Ireland of the twenty-first century." Chris Morash, Trinity College Dublin

"Urgent, lucid, and sophisticated, O'Faolain in his essays takes Ireland as a test-case of the modern world. The astute introduction and editing by Brad Kent show just how much these analyses have to say to us now. A rich and satisfying volume." Declan Kiberd, University of Notre Dame