The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature offers a fresh new look at the origins of literary modernism in Ireland, tracing a history of Irish writing through James Clarence Mangan, J.M. Synge, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett. Beginning with the archives of the Ordnance Survey, which mapped Ireland between 1824 and 1846, the book argues that one of the sources of Irish modernism lies in the attempt by the Survey to produce a comprehensive archive of a land emerging rapidly into modernity. The Ordnance Survey instituted a practice of depicting the country as modern, fragmented, alienated, and troubled, both diagnosing and representing a landscape burdened with the paradoxes of colonial modernity. Subsequent literature returns in varying ways, both imitative and combative, to the complex representational challenge that the Survey confronts and seeks to surmount. From a colonial mapping project to an engine of nationalist imagining, and finally a framework by which to evade the claims of the postcolonial nation, the Ordnance Survey was a central imaginative source of what makes Irish modernist writing both formally innovative and politically challenging. Drawing on literary theory, studies of space, the history of cartography, postcolonial theory, archive theory, and the field Irish Studies, The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature paints a picture of Irish writing deeply engaged in the representation of a multi-layered landscape.

THE GOVERNMENT PARASITE A Tongue-in Cheek Boomer's Eyed View of History Whether personal or historical, beginnings are the most important part of stories, followed by how we got here and now. The author introduces himself through his beginnings; "Growing Up in Fifties Philly" This is followed by the beginnings of the United States of America in Ancient Greece and the millennia leading to the conflict, struggle and the new governmental structure that became the United States. Jumping ahead 100 years, the roots of "The Progressives" and how they have changed the direction of the nation through Presidents like Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and F.D.R. What has the New Millennia brought for the author and the Nation? And, where do we go from here? A twist is applied with mostly humorous, cynical or alarmed author inserted observations. (sic)