Books

Literary anthologies feature many of Ireland’s most well-known authors, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, George Bernard Shaw, Seán O’Casey, James Joyce, and Brendan Behan among them. While a number of notable scholars have contended that middle-class Irish Americans rejected or ignored this rebellious group of poets, playwrights, and novelists in favor of a conservative Catholic subculture brought over with the mass migration of the mid-nineteenth century, Stephen G. Butler demonstrates that the transatlantic relationship between these figures and a segment of Irish American journalists and citizens is more complicated—and sometimes more collaborative—than previously acknowledged.