This course examines the extraordinary achievements of Irish writers in the last decade of the 19th century and the first third of the 20th century. Students read in all the genres (poetry, short story, novel, drama) that were remade by Irish writers during the tumultuous period from the fall of Charles Stewart Parnell through the Easter Rising in 1916 and into the early years of the Irish republic in the 1930s. Authors studied include Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Lady Augusta Gregory, John Synge, Sean O’Casey, Elizabeth Bowen, and Flann O’Brien. Study of the literature itself is balanced by consideration of the social and historical contexts of Ireland under the Union with Britain and after the Union was partially broken. Refining the lens through which to view this literature requires addressing such topics as Irish cultural nationalism, the horror of civil war and the obstacles to national reconciliation, and the clashes between revolutionary anti-imperialism and conservative Catholicism, between rural and urban identities, and between provincialism and cosmopolitanism as strategies for literary self-fashioning.