"This innovative collection of essays views Irish culture from the eighteenth-century to the present day, covering a wide range of Irish topics and authors. Bishop Berkeley, Thomas Moore, Oliver Goldsmith, Francis Hutcheson, Laurence Sterne, Richard Steele, Edmund Burke, Maria Edgeworth, W.B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, James Stephens, Charles Lever, Austin Clarke, Kate O'Brien and Francis Stuart are among the more familiar writers, but the author also sets out to retrieve a range of neglected Irish writers including William Dunkin, John Toland, Frederick Ryan, 'Father Prout', William McGinn, Shan Bullock, Canon Sheehan and George Birmingham."--Jacket.