Though written by a respected Eng. Lit. academic, this is not at all an academic book; it is rather a work of sustained polemic, almost wilfully prolix, often hunting hares to left and right, and thought-provoking in many of its intellectual and critical stances. The early sections consider the founding fathers and grand fathers of modem Irish literature, Wilde, Shaw, Somerville and Ross, Yeats, Synge - though not, for some reason, George Moore, who is given no sustained critical treatment. Kiberd moves on to war (including the Great War) and revolution, the new, quasi-official national mythology which succeeded them, and so gradually on to the present. He places much emphasis on Ireland's "post-colonial" identity, comparing this with the former French possessions in Africa where a new, compound literature has sprouted; though perhaps a better parallel might have been with the various Slavonic lands of Eastern and Central Europe in reaction against their former Germanic (and Russian) overlords.
Kiberd is one of the relatively few contemporary critics who treats Brendan Behan as an important writer, though is he justified in comparing The Quare Fella with the "absurdist" plays of Ionesco and Genet? Behan's play is full of populist, music-hall vitality, while theirs reek of coterie intellectualism and facile dialectics. And while he gives some prominence to that currently fashionable trio of poets, MacGreevy, Devlin and Coffey, he ignores other, interesting figures of the time such as F.R. Higgins, Patrick MacDonogh, Donagh MacDonagh, etc., who do not fit into the present revisionist canon. However, the book is not intended as a literary survey complete with illuminated maps, it is rather a sort of personalised thesis, and while most academic studies pursue a few unoriginal ideas to the death, this bristles with intellectual vitality.