The work of Irish lesbian and gay writers has received little sustained attention from literary critics and cultural theorists. This pioneering collection of essays sets out to examine the relationship between nationalism and sexuality identity and argues that literary expressions of sexual dissidence in Ireland cannot be abstracted from Ireland's experience of colonization. The emergence of a nation state further complicated that relationship leading to an implicit reformation of heterosexuality within nationalist discourses. This collection of original essays shows how aspects of the work of Irish lesbian and gay writers personally engaged with the complex socio-political changes in Ireland during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An examination of the work of writers such as Oscar Wilde, Somerville and Ross, Eva Gore-Booth, Roger Casement, Kate O'Brien, Michael MacLiammoir, Brendan Behan, Mary Dorcey and Elizabeth Bowen sheds new light on this fascinating period and on a little understood aspect of Ireland's literary heritage. Other writers and modes of literary endeavour examined in the collection are popular fiction and the work of Molly Keane, Gaelic poetry and the work of Cathal O Searchaigh, Irish cinema and the work of Neil Jordan as well as theatre through a study of David Grant's play Tangles. Sex, Nation and Dissent covers an area neglected in Irish Studies and makes an important contribution to academic and political debates within literary studies, history, anthropology, cultural studies and critical theory. Edited by Éibhear Walshe, Department of English, University College, Cork