This book examines the topic of excess in modern Irish writing in terms of mysticism, materialism, myth and language. The study engages ideas of excess as they appear in works by major thinkers from Hegel, Kierkegaard and Marx through to Nietzsche, Bataille, Derrida and, more recently, Badiou. Poems, plays and fiction by a wide range of Irish authors are considered. These include works by Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, G. B. Shaw, Patrick Pearse, James Joyce, Sean OCasey, Louis MacNeice, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, Roddy Doyle, Seamus Heaney, Marina Carr and Medbh McGuckian.  The readings presented illustrate how Matthew Arnolds nineteenth-century idea of the excessive character of the Celt is itself exceeded within the modernity of twentieth-century Irish writing.

Michael McAteer is Associate Professor at the Institute of English and American Studies, Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest. Previously, he taught Irish writing at the School of English, Queens University Belfast. His previous publications include Yeats and European Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Silence in Modern Irish Literature (ed.) (Brill, 2017).

Chapter One: Introduction.- Part One: Mystical Excess.- Chapter Two: Excess as Spiritual Ecstasy: Yeats and Joyce.- Chapter Three: Oriental Excess: Wilde, Yeats, MacNeice.- Chapter Four: Transgressive Sacrifice: Pearse, Yeats, Carr.- Part Two: Material Excess.- Chapter Five: Money and Melodrama: Boucicault, Wilde, Shaw.- Chapter Six: Disposable Living: OCasey, Beckett, Doyle.- Chapter Seven: Trashing Ulster: Patterson and Reid.- Part Three: Mythic and Linguistic Excess.- Chapter Eight: Mythic Excess:FinnegansWake.- Chapter Nine: A-voiding the Subject: Bowen and Beckett.- Chapter Ten: Rhyming Away: Heaney, Longley, Muldoon, McGuckian.