Irish literature remains, in the popular imagination, a matter of Wilde, Shaw, Synge, Yeats and Joyce. The recent prominence of Seamus Heaney and other poets from the north of Ireland, and the complex Irish, British and cosmopolitan contexts of their work, have altered our sense of the nature and development of Irish literature in English. By tracing a broader stream of tradition to its sources in the 17th century, the author of this book offers new perspectives on the question of Irish national and cultural identity.