From Banned to Classic - The Edna O'Brien Example

 Finishing up on the older notes from Google Keep.

Banned, burned and reviled: what was so radical about Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls? by Eimear McBride (The New Statesman)

So how is it possible that these three slim novels – which caused such a degree of moral pandemonium that they were condemned by a (subsequently disgraced) politician to a (subsequently disgraced) archbishop as “filth” – have survived their scandalous genesis, outlived all their chauvinistic critics and only continued to grow in stature?

One answer is that they set a precedent. With their creation O’Brien gave voice to the experiences of a previously muzzled generation of Irish women. Into bodies raised to the expectation of violence, rape, forced pregnancy, innumerable dangerous childbirths, domestic bondage and the ever-present risk of institutionalisation for intentionally or unintentionally bringing social shame on male relations, she breathed the radical oxygen of choice, desire and sensual delight. To minds shackled by the many Machiavellian impositions of religious prohibition, institutional contempt and unquestioning denigration of female intellect, she sang the song of awareness, of dissent and the necessity of searching out better, and more.

Let it not be thought that our current right-wing fetish for book-banning may  result in the death of those books.

sch 11/9