"Arranged chronologically by decade, from the 1890s to the 1990s, each decade is divided into two different types of writing: critical/documentary and imaginative writing, and is accompanied by a headnote which situates it thematically and chronologically. The Reader is also structured for thematic study by listing all the pieces included under a series of topic headings. The wide range of material encompasses writings of well-known figures in the Irish canon and neglected writers alike. This will appeal to the general reader, but also makes Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century ideal as a core text, providing a unique focus for detailed study in a single volume."--BOOK JACKET.

Based on personal memories of his life in Ireland and Scotland in the early 1900s, this was Patrick MacGill's first novel. It tells the story of Dermod Flynn an independent and feisty youth who earns a meagre living as an itinerant farm hand in Donegal and County Tyrone before coming to Scotland with a potato-picking squad. After living on the road, labouring and navvying, Dermod finds work on the hydro-electric scheme at Kinlochleven –an extraordinarily brutal and unforgiving environment where hundreds died on one of the biggest engineering projects of its time. Against this background, Dermod reads voraciously, begins to discover his talent as a writer and is eventually lured to Fleet Street, where he briefly becomes a journalist. Peopled with extraordinary characters, Children of the Dead End is a gritty and uncompromising expose of the near slavery endured by the poor in Scotland and Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century.

This is the definitive story of the men who built the railways – the unknown Victorian labourers who blasted, tunnelled, drank and brawled their way across nineteenth-century England. Preached at and plundered, sworn at and swindled, this anarchic elite endured perils and disasters, and carved out of the English countryside an industrial-age architecture unparalleled in grandeur and audacity since the building of the cathedrals.

Moleskin Joe is one of the most memorable characters to appear in Patrick MacGill's first two books, Children of the Dead End and The Rat-Pit. This sequel, first published in 1923, recalls the tramps and navvies MacGill encountered during his time on the road in Scotland and the north of England in the early years of the twentieth century. It centres around the adventures of Moleskin Joe, with his philosophy of 'there's a good time comin', although we may never live to see it', who in this book falls in love with a young Irish woman he meets on his travels. Filled with superb characterisation, humour, poignancy and eloquence, Moleskin Joe is a vivid portrayal of the hardships of the immigrant experience, which McGill not only experienced himself, but also successfully exposed to a huge audience through his writing.

A major study of Catholic and Protestant Irish in an important but neglected center of historic Irish settlement where communal violence and Irish-related antipathy bore the hallmarks of the Liverpool and Glasgow experiences. "Culture, Conflict and Migration... deserves to be read as an important contribution to the growing literature on the Irish in Britain."Irish Studies Review