Drawing together the strands of intellectual debate on Ireland's contested colonial history, and its problematic literary historical, historiographical and theoretical legacies, Ireland and Postcolonial Studies: Theory, Discourse, Utopia illuminates and explicates the position occupied by postcolonial theory in shaping contemporary Irish culture. Rather than merely restate existing arguments, the volume is framed as an interrogative critical genealogy of all facets of Irish postcolonial studies. Ireland and Postcolonial Studies provides an original, substantive and up-to-date contribution to a key intellectual field in Irish literary and cultural history. Beginning with the founding of the Field Day Company in the early 1980s and covering such topics as feminism; utopianism; Marxism; nationalism; revisionism; modernization; subaltern studies; and the role of the university, the volume charts the subsequent development of postcolonial perspectives on Irish cultural and historical studies.