The dramatic career of the Irish playwright J.M. Synge, from his first plays in 1902 to his premature death in 1909, almost exactly coincided with the years of Edward VII's reign. Those years have long been studied in a British context, but Synge and Edwardian Ireland is the first book to explore the cultural life of Edwardian Ireland as a distinctive period. By emphasizing several less familiar Irish contexts for Synge's work - including a new sociological awareness, the rise of a local celebrity culture, an international theatre context, the arts and crafts movement, Irish...

This book examines the recent expansion of Ireland's literary tradition to include home-grown crime fiction. It surveys the wave of books that use genre structures to explore specifically Irish issues such as the Troubles and the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger, as well as Irish experiences of human trafficking, the supernatural, abortion, and civic corruption. These novels are as likely to address the national regulation of sexuality through institutions like the Magdalen Laundries as they are to follow serial killers through the American South or to trace international corporate...