Parodied Locations: A Play on Genre Conventions and Place in Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth and Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things

Abstract

Flann O’Brien in The Poor Mouth and Alasdair Gray in Poor Things use parody (of Gaeltacht memoirs and Gothic fiction respectively) to join in a discussion on literary representations of their homelands (Ireland and Scotland). This paper discusses the subversive play on the reader’s expectations regarding literary representation of places driven by previous knowledge of the parodied genre’s conventions which the two authors use to pinpoint the inadequacy of the hitherto existing literary tradition.