From Swift's repulsive shit-flinging Yahoos to Beckett's dying but never quite dead moribunds, Irish literature has long been perceived as being synonymous with subversion and all forms of subversiveness. But what constitutes a subversive text or a subversive writer in twenty-first-century Ireland? The essays in this volume set out to redefine and rethink the subversive potential of modern Irish literature. Crossing three central genres, one common denominator running through these essays whether dealing with canonical writers like Yeats, Beckett and Flann O'Brien, or lesser known...

Using the work of W.Bion and D.Winnicott, this book offers a psychoanalytic study of Beckett's aesthetics of absence. Focusing on the first prose trilogy and Waiting for Godot, it offers a critical challenge to accepted viewpoints of Beckett's negative status, not only within psychoanalytic literary criticism, but within Beckett criticism at large.