Declan Kiberd, author of the award-winning Irish Classics and Inventing Ireland, argues that political conflict between Ireland and England ultimately resulted in cultural confluence--causing the English literary tradition to greatly influence Irish language writing. Continuing his exploration of the role of Irish politics and culture in a decolonizing world, Kiberd covers Anglo-Irish literature, the fate of the Irish language and the Celtic Tiger. This collection of Kiberd's work over twenty-five years demonstrates the extraordinary range, astuteness and wit that have made him a defining voice in Irish studies and beyond.

Declan Kiberd is Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at University College Dublin.

1. Introduction: the Irish writer and the world; 2. The fall of the stage Irishman; 3. Storytelling: the Gaelic tradition; 4. Writers in quarantine? The case for Irish studies; 5. Synge, Yeats and Bardic poetry; 6. George Moore's Gaelic Law Party; 7. The flowering tree: modern poetry in Irish; 8. On national culture; 9. White skins, black masks: Celticism and Negritude; 10. From nationalism to liberation; 11. The war against the past; 12. The elephant of revolutionary forgetfulness; 13. Reinventing England; 14. Museums and learning; 15. Joyce's Ellmann, Ellmann's Joyce; 16. Multiculturalism: the strange death of Liberal Europe; 17. The Celtic Tiger: a cultural history; 18. The city in Irish culture; 19. Strangers in their own country: multiculturalism in Ireland.