In The Irish Writer and the World (2005), Declan Kiberd articulates the need for “a discrimination of modernisms” that would account for particular differences between Irish modernism and other national forms of modernism. My dissertation takes up this challenge by considering how Irish writers responded to the modernist doctrine of impersonality that effectively served to legitimate the authorial self. It argues that James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Brian O'Nolan, better known as Flann O'Brien, refused to accept the authority of the author during the postcolonial period in Ireland when writing about the self almost invariably meant writing about the nation. It further contends that these writers deliberately blurred the distinction between author and subject in their autobiographical fiction to foreground the question of origin and source that was fundamental to their culture at this time. Building upon recent work on Irish life writing by Liam Harte and others, I make the case that Joyce, Beckett, and O'Nolan fictionalized their experiences in complex and different ways to expose the tension that exists between the personal and the impersonal within the postcolonial context. Beyond that, I complicate Tyrus Miller's cosmopolitan conception of late modernism by reading these writers' attempts to reopen the debate about impersonality as a response to Irish state nationalism. Finally, I deploy Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch'ien's definition of “weird English” to suggest that they not only sought to invent a personal, private style through their practice of linguistic polyculturality, but to underscore the political and social function of language as well. In the end, therefore, my dissertation borrows directly from autobiography, postcolonial studies, and translation studies to explain how Joyce, Beckett, and O'Nolan pictured themselves in what Stephen Dedalus famously called the “cracked lookingglass” of Irish art. By focusing upon the fractured self-portraits these writers produced in the nineteen-thirties, it ultimately asserts that they invented a distinctively Irish form of the modernist Künstlerroman.