'Each of these seven essays, ranging from a study of the influence of Irish Royalists in the exiled court of Charles II to an analysis of the arson attacks of the anti-Treaty IRA during the Civil War, offers important new insights into key areas of Irish historiography. Collectively, in the breadth of their subject matter and the quality of their research and argument, they illustrate the high standard of scholarship that British-based Irish Studies students contribute to the field of Irish history'. Dr Andrew J. Wilson, Loyola University of Chicago."This lively collection of essays offers illuminating rereadings of modern Irish literature. It is often interdisciplinary in scope, but is meticulous rather than modish in its methdologies, drawing on the rich interplay between literary, musical, filmic and historical texts. Its diversity of subject and theme creates a collection that, far from being disparate, diagnoses a series of competing tendencies in twentieth and twenty-first century Irish literature: between the innovative and the inherited, the high and low, the real and the mythic, the appropriated and the imposed. The 1916 Uprising is a historical touchstone that prompts a series of revealing responses; the essays on Irish modernism and music also offer striking and informative reassessments of the prevailing critical consensus. Scrupulously and sensitively edited throughout, it offers a welcome intervention in the ongoing reconsideration and re-evaluation of modern Irish Literature, and is an excellent resource both for students and scholars in the field".Dr. William May, Research Fellow in Humanities, University of Southampton