Gaelic Ireland : apocalypse now? -- Bardic poetry : the loss of aura -- Saving civilization : Céitinn and Ó Bruadair -- Dying acts : Ó Rathaille and others -- Endings and beginnings : Mac Cuarta and after -- Jonathan Swift : a colonial outsider? -- Nostalgia as protest : Goldsmith's 'Deserted village' -- Radical pastoral : Goldsmith's She stoops to conquer -- Sheridan and subversion -- Eibhlín Dhubh Ní Chonaill : the lament for Art Ó Laoghaire -- Brian Merriman's midnight court -- Burke, Ireland and revolution -- Republican self-fashioning : the journal of Wolf Tone -- Native informants: Maria Edgeworth and Castle Rackrent -- Confronting famine : Carleton's peasantry -- Feudalism falling : A drama in muslin -- Love songs of Connacht -- Anarchist attitudes : Oscar Wilde -- George Bernard Shaw : Arms and the man -- Somerville and Ross : The silver fox -- Undead in the nineties : Bram Stoker and Dracula -- Augusta Gregory's Cuchulain : the rebirth of the hero -- Synge's Triste tropiques : the Aran Islands -- W.B. Yeats : building amid ruins -- Ulysses, newspapers and modernism -- After the revolution : O'Casey and O'Flaherty -- Gaelic absurdism : At swim-two-birds -- The Blasket autobiographies -- Incorrigibly plural : Louis MacNeice -- Kate O'Brien : The ante-room -- All the dead voices : Cré na cille -- Underdeveloped comedy : Patrick Kavanagh -- Anglo-Gaelic literature : Seán Ó Riordáin -- Irish narrative : a short history.