Ireland and Irish Cultural Studies invites readers to a lively discussion among Irish, British, and American scholars who are deconstructing and reconstructing Irish culture of and for the 1990s. In voices as fresh as The Cranberries, they are not only joining the Irish conversation but holding it up to scrutiny—cutting through sentimental evocations of donkey carts and Celtic twilights, exposing the critically hailed “radical inversions” of The Crying Game as more conventionally romantic than they might appear, and disclosing Guinness’s efforts to attract gay and lesbian beer drinkers in 1995, the centenary of Oscar Wilde’s trial and imprisonment.
The recent advent of postcolonial theory in the Irish academy, which sparked this special issue of SAQ, has had a profound effect on the Irish conversation and the turn it is taking today. As the island writes back, a rising faction in Irish studies is resisting what some see as yet another colonization, insisting that theory accommodate and respond to Ireland’s concerns and questions.

Contributors. Guinn Batten, Joe Cleary, Luke Dodd, Luke Gibbons, Dillon Johnston, David Kellogg, Declan Keberd, Aine O’Brien, Lance Pettitt, Lawrence J. Taylor, John Paul Waters, Clair Wills