In its terrible state o'chassis, does Northern Ireland's history interweave with or overwhelm the poetic imagination? When it comes to a ‘chronic sovereignty neurosis’ the cultural spin doctors are always ready with their diagnoses, but what about the creative writers? The dilemma involves not only the writer's perception of how poiesis intersects with politics, but also his or her relation to tradition(s), literary or otherwise: does he or she embrace the community with all its intimate biases or become a solitary figure, abstracted, seeking objectivity? In Transitions, Richard Kearney uncovers an apparent transitional crisis at the core of modern Irish cultural narratives and explores how they mediate between the images of the past and those of the future. Of particular importance are what he terms ‘postmodern’ narratives, those which ‘borrow freely from the idioms of both modernity and tradition, one moment endorsing a deconstruction of tradition, another reinventing the stories of the past transmitted by cultural memory.’ There are, broadly speaking, two competing conceptions of postmodernism: one that is anti-referential, anarchic, decentred, revelling in endless simulation, resulting from the consumerisation of the image and the destructive logic of late capitalism; another which is referential and self-reflexive. The latter, to which Kearney subscribes, is the more constructive for writers and artists.