This collection of essays views Irish culture from the 18th century to the end of the 20th century. Among the writers are Bishop Berkeley, Thomas Moore, Oliver Goldsmith, Maria Edgeworth, W.B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett and Kate O'Brien. Also included are a number of neglected Irish writers such as William Dunkin, John Toland, Frederick Ryan, Father Prout , and George Birmingham. The topics range from 18th-century satire and sentimentalism to the modern Irish novel, the carnivalesque in early 19th-century Cork to the philosophy of Tolan and Berkeley. The book concludes with an intervention into the ongoing debate surrounding revisionism in Irish studies.