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This innovative collection of essays views Irish culture from the eighteenth century to the present day, covering a wide range of Irish topics and authors. Bishop Berkeley, Thomas Moore, Oliver Goldsmith, Francis Hutcheson, Laurence Sterne, Richard Steele, Edmund Burke, Maria Edgeworth, W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, James Stephens, Charles Lever, Austin Clarke, Kate O'Brien, and Francis Stuart are among the more familiar writers, but the author also sets out to retrieve a range of valuable yet neglected Irish writers including William Dunkin, John Toland, Frederick Ryan, Father Prout, William McGinn, Shan Bullock, Canon Sheehan, and George Birmingham.

The book's topics range from eighteenth-century satire and sentimentalism to the modern Irish novel, and from the carnivalesque in early nineteenth-century Cork to the philosophy of Toland and Berkeley. In moving from celebrated reputations to some lesser-known writers, the book also breaches the boundaries between literary criticism, and intellectual and political history. It concludes with a vigorous intervention into the ongoing debate surrounding revisionism in Irish Studies.