The earliest written poetry in Ireland is mediated through a Christian lens. Monasticmanuscripts reveal rich strata of pre-Christian myths and poetic forms that bleed intoChristian content, potentially disrupting the intended orthodoxy. These texts display aknotwork of pagan and Christian elements, equally alert to the natural world and theincarnational word.  A delight in the materiality of the word, in the miraculous powerof the manuscript, is a distinctive feature of this early poetry, and tells us somethingabout the high status of the poet in traditional Gaelic society. The preservation ofGaelic myths and values by monastic scribes provided Revivalist poets like Yeatswith a pre-Christian Irish identity rooted in the power of nature, and allowed Yeats tofind a way to be Irish and not Catholic. The pagan world kicks back against Christianorthodoxy again in the work of later poets, including Patrick Kavanagh, AustinClarke, and Paula Meehan.

Chapter 4 focuses the discussion on Fanon’s critique of the complicity of medicine and psychiatry with the institution of colonialism. This chapter contextualizes what tend to be neglected elements of Fanon’s work and relates them to his clinical practice in illuminating ways. This chapter shows that madness and what Fanon dubs the ‘North African syndrome’ were nothing but manifestations of colonial assimilation and the attendant violence to which it gave rise as it brought about the pulverization of traditional society. The chapter ascertains how the medical establishment was employed as the instrument of coloniality and how psychiatry was implicated in the alienation of the colonized Algerians.

The controversial nature of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s polemical writing has had theeffect of sidelining his earlier literary criticism, in particular his engagement withseveral French Catholic writers. A more nuanced exploration of his work as a wholedisplays a complex intersection of secularism and religious feeling. O’Brien, thepublic intellectual determined to fly by the nets of political and religious doctrine,nevertheless produces work saturated with religious language, forms, and structuresof feeling. His writing demonstrates a tension between his secularism and hisrepeated return to the language of suffering, sacrifice, heresy, and schism. O’Brien’sfamily history, with its traumatic relationship to events during the violent formation ofthe Irish state, is a helpful lens through which to view this emotional substratumwithin his writings.  His later writings emphasise the forces in his life that resistedcategorization, and thus offer a kind of apophatic vision, a dark enlightenment.

Central to the work of Fanon is a conception of history and international politics enabling nations to share the same history without losing their differences. Fanon inaugurates a new humanism which is premised on an ethics that respects difference. The conclusion shows that he was an ethical thinker: anti-racist, humanist and internationalist.

This chapter explore five works of gay literary autobiographical writing about the 1970s. These autobiographies by Michael Rumaker, Robert Glück, Kevin Killian, Essex Hemphill, and Bernard Cooper paint an ambivalent picture of the decade, a period in which the unprecedented rewards and celebratory tenor of sexual liberation did not merely erase the traumas of the past: homophobia, self-hatred, and abusive relationships. Most of these writers are quite different from one another; they belonged to different gay cultural scenes and lived and worked in different cities across the US. By identifying shared themes across their work, however, this chapter illuminates why the 1970s was a pivotal moment in the formation of gay literature as we know it.

The Roman eagle, speaking for Christianity, teaches the insuperable difference between divine and human justice. Given the life Dante has endorsed, the eagle’s view and Dante’s must diverge. They do so regarding the case of one who lives a good life but, without Christian faith, is condemned. Why, if reason guides him to that life, is faith nevertheless needed?The eagle’s response makes clear that it’s not justice, a common good, but resurrection that is the ultimate concern.God’s arbitrariness in dispensing this good is a credential of the power needed to provide it.

The Heaven of Saturn depicts the effect that orientation on this good has on philosophy. With the question of human good taken as resolved, the contemplatives actively discourage reasoned inquiry concerning humanly significant matters; any such inquiry could suggest doubt regarding God’s power to provide the key good.Peter Damian, a source of the handmaiden image, known for thinking God to be unbounded by the law of noncontradiction, conveys this message.He embraces the unknowability of God’s ways even to those who have been saved.The stark clarity of Peter’s position prepares Dante’s confrontation with this novel obstacle to the philosophic life raised by Christianity.

Gay American autobiographical writing since the year 2000 became “post-gay,” where “gay” denotes a distinctive, unitary gay male cultural tradition. Post-gay means gay plus: the “post” signifies the movement toward an intersectional model of identity, where other dimensions of culture are integrated with sexuality, and sexual cultures – such as elite gay culture – are transformed by their intersection with black, brown, yellow, and other colors of the rainbow. The 1990s saw the explosive visibility of what was then called the “lesbigay” community in all areas of American public life. That tide ebbed during the second Bush administration, in the backlash against LGBT rights. But the cultural work progressed apace, becoming socially diversified. The first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen the proliferation of gay US voices. Not simply de-pathologized, and not simply decriminalized, self-consciously gay autobiographical writing has multiplied into as many niche segments as the overall population. These include hyphenated queer Chicano authors, memoirs about drug addiction, and pre-Obergefell gay marriage chronicles, among other intersectional narratives.

The work of Bourdieu and Foucault can help identify the processes and strategies bywhich the Irish Catholic Church gained dominance and control over the lives of itsmembers.  The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed the increasing power ofthe Church in Ireland, not least by its control over key institutions.  People lived ‘inCatholic time and space’, internalizing systems of discipline and codes of conduct.The intricate knotwork of ‘Catholic’ and ‘Irish’ identity meant that Church dominationwas bound up with the drive to modernize and civilize the nation. The keymechanisms used to create obedient subjects were penitential practices, corporalpunishment, confession, and confinement. John McGahern’s fictionand memoir explore the ways in which Catholic corporal punishment and patriarchalauthority extended into domestic spaces. His writings offer a useful representation ofthese mechanisms of control and punishment, but also narrate quiet moments ofresistance.

Anglican Gothic fiction proceeds beyond broad anti-Catholicism to consider theological problems. To some Anglican writers, the novel appealed as a more attractive vehicle for these ideas than religious tracts. In Melmoth the Wanderer, Charles Maturin articulates in novel form the ideas of an earlier sermon, which argues that specific, false doctrines of Catholicism lead to damnation. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray approaches idolatry as obstructive because it places objects between the believer and paths to salvation. Both in Carmilla and in short fiction, Sheridan Le Fanu asserts what he believes are central topics for Victorian religious debate: the implications of science for theories of the natrural order, and damnation and persecution as realities of a spiritual life.

Religious identity and material culture intersect in Irish society and literature. Churcharchitecture, religious artefacts, and ritual paraphernalia find their origins in theDevotional Revolution, when under the influence of Cardinal Paul Cullen, IrishCatholic practices were standardised and aligned with Rome. During this period, thebuilding of outsized churches, along with the ritualized bodies of believers, becamesignifiers of an increasingly respectable and confident Irish Catholic identity. The1932 Eucharistic Congress illustrates the merging of church and state, and theutilisation of modern modes of production, dissemination, and consumption. VaticanII’s makeover of the liturgy allowed for modern designs in architecture and print totransform the experience of the Mass. Religion and nationalism increasingly sharedthe same iconography and cultural vocabulary in twentieth-century Ireland. Such aconflation of ‘Catholic’ and ‘Irish’ finds another material counterpart in theMagdalene Laundries, which now stand as a symbol of the church/state institutionalabuse of Irish women and children.

Contrary to the narrative of the Irish Catholic Church’s decline, there exists a range of evidence for a twenty-first-century religious revival. Some of the modern religious deviate from formal practice, engaging with Christianity away from the major churches, while other spiritual practices accord with twenty-first-century Ireland’s cultural diversity. Irish literature has challenged literature but, at times, idealised it. As the religious landscape of Ireland changes, Irish culture finds new ways to explore faith.

This chapter examines John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s The False One with special reference to its treatment of Cleopatra, who gradually emerges as a deuteragonist of Julius Caesar. Through Cleopatra’s prominence, the play develops concerns central to the socio-political and cultural debate under King James I. Gender preoccupations and the link between effeminacy and luxury are especially important, in that they turn out to be the pivot around which the whole play ultimately revolves. In particular, the playwrights’ foray into this connection enables the expression of scepticism about the pursuit of profit as the primary driving force of colonial ventures. In its unusual deployment of she-tragedy as a venue for the exploration and criticism of contemporary (masculine) political manoeuvring, its high-spirited and pungent appropriation of Roman history, and its freshly composite characterisation of Cleopatra as an actively decisive force in determining Caesar’s path of temptation, fall and regeneration, The False One proves to be one of the most captivating plays dealing with ancient Rome written in early modern England, as well as far more entertaining and politically relevant than often assumed.