'Something entirely new': A Critical History of An Béal Bocht, 1941–75

Abstract

This article reconstructs an early reception of Brian Ó Nualláin’s An Béal Bocht (1941) in which the novel was hailed as a breakthrough work that advanced the Irish-language prose tradition and promised to win new readers of Irish. The story of how this initial enthusiasm hardened into a critical diminishment of Ó Nualláin’s achievement as an obscure parody involves the author’s own efforts to associate the novel with Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s An tOileánach, the dampening of the optimism which surrounded the Irish language in the 1940s, and the impact of Patrick C. Power’s translation, The Poor Mouth, on how An Béal Bocht was understood. By charting the evolution of An Béal Bocht’s reception history, this article furthers contemporary scholarship on the promise Ó Nualláin’s novel still holds for Irish-language prose.

Keywords

• An Béal Bocht
• reception history
• metacriticism
• Tomás Ó Criomhthain
• Irish-language literature