This collection looks at some of the tensions created when Anglo-Irish writers reflected upon their preferred subject matter, Ireland and their unhyphenated Catholic contemporaries. Tracey shows how Anglo-Irish writers founded modern Irish literature in English, identifying themselves with their native country and its people. Yet they often felt themselves surrounded and watched by an "Unappeasable Host", a population that resented them.
Some of the topics and authors covered in the essays, more than half of which are new, include: the colonial novel, Edgeworth, the Banim Brothers, Roger O'Connor, Le Fanu, Yeats, Synge, Joyce, and Bowen. Robert Tracey, Professor of English and Celtic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, has been a leading scholar in Irish studies for four decades.