This volume contains introductions and historical background to numerous British and Irish literary works.

Examines the relationship between the political/social climate during which books were written and the works themselves. This volume focuses on major fiction, poetry and nonfiction from Great Britain and Ireland, from the Victorian Era to the present.

Examines the relationship between the political/social climate during which books were written and the works themselves. This volume focuses on major fiction, poetry and nonfiction from Great Britain and Ireland, from the Victorian Era to the present.

Irish literature's roots have been traced to the 7th-9th century. This is a rich and hardy literature starting with descriptions of the brave deeds of kings, saints and other heroes. These were followed by generous veins of religious, historical, genealogical, scientific and other works. The development of prose, poetry and drama raced along with the times. Modern, well-known Irish writers include: William Yeats, James Joyce, Sean Casey, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, John Synge and Samuel Beckett.

This study pairs selected Irish and British women novelists of three periods, relating their voices to the women's movements in their respective nations. In the first wave, nationalist and militant ideologies competed with the suffrage fight in Ireland. Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September illustrates the melancholy of gender performance and confusion of ethnic identity in the dying Anglo-Irish Ascendancy class. In England, suffrage ideologies clashed with socialism and patriotism. Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway contains a political unconscious that links its characters across class and gender. In the second wave, heterosexual romantic relationships come under scrutiny. Edna O'Brien's Country Girls trilogy reveals ways in which Irish Catholic ideologies abject femaleness; her characters internalize this abjection to the point of self-destruction. Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook pits the protagonist's aspirations to write novels against the Communist Party's prohibitions on bourgeois values. In the third wave, Irish writers express the frustrations of their cultural identity. Nuala O'Faolain's My Dream of You takes her protagonist back to Ireland to heal her psychic wounds. In England, Thatcherism had created a materialistic culture that eroded many feminists' socialist values. Fay Weldon's Big Woman satirizes the demise of second-wave idealism, asking where feminism can go from here.