This book identifies the origin, the development and, ultimately, the success of the Irish literary tradition in English as one of the first literatures that is both national and colonial. It demonstrates the remarkable relationships between works as diverse as Joyce's Dubliners and Bram Stoker's Dracula, and the worlds of the French Revolution and the Irish famine. Deane also shows how almost all the activities of Irish print culture--novels, songs, typefaces, historical analyses, poems--struggle within the limits imposed by its inheritance.