Among its various progenitors, literary Modernism can number two major Irish writers, James Joyce and W. B. Yeats, and a third, Samuel Beckett, who carried the 'revolution of the word' into a second generation. Yet Ireland as a nation came late to modernity. From the date of its symbolic inception as Europe's 'newest' state, retrospectively conferred on that foundational act of insurrection at Easter 1916, through the era of new nationalisms of the...