James Orr was the foremost of the Ulster Weaver poets and has been favourably compared to his near contemporary Robert Burns. Baraniuk looks at Orr's life and work, examining the changing social, political and theological context of his writing and reassessing his contribution to radical literature and culture during the Romantic era.

The Belfast Jacobin is the first-ever biography of Samuel Neilson, a founding member of the Society of United Irishmen whose profound influence on this radical movement was to alter the course of Irish history. Samuel Neilson joined Wolfe Tone and Thomas Russell at the inaugural meeting of the United Irishmen in 1791, forming a radical front that would challenge the political realities of the day in increasingly strident ways. As editor of the Northern Star, Neilson was to be a principal figure in shaping the United Irishmen’s ideology before the newspaper was suppressed by the military. He brought the excitement caused by the French Revolution into Irish focus, putting public dissatisfaction into words and, later, gathering the forces necessary for revolt. Kenneth Dawson, conducting original research and drawing upon innumerable archive sources, reveals Neilson’s formidable strength as an organiser of radical politics, his incessant run-ins with the authorities, and his central role in planning the United Irish Rebellion of 1798. Samuel Neilson brought talk of revolution to the street – The Belfast Jacobin is a pivotal history that illuminates the true import of his deeds and writing, sorely obscured in many accounts of the 1790s.

The paperback edition of the extremely popular The Men of No Property is a study of the popular dimensions of Irish radicalism in the age of the French revolution. It focuses on the lower-class secret society, the Defenders, and the more familiar face of radicalism in this period, the Society of United Irishmen. Particular attention is paid to the vigorous traditions of street protest in eighteenth-century Dublin. The picture which emerges is of a revolutionary movement which was both more radical in its rhetoric and objectives and more popular in its social base than has previously been allowed.

This volume is the first sustained examination of the ways in which the diverse kinds of confinement intersect with Western ideologies of subjectivity, investigating the modern nation-state's reliance on captivity as a means of consolidating notions of individual and national sovereignty.