“…Likely familiar to readers of Irish Studies Review, this persistence may be due to the discipline's entanglements with Irish Studies and thus its sharing of key (and ongoing) debates and discourses with history, which has been dominated by revisionism since the 1990s, leading to many prominent literary critics to forcefully maintain the postcolonial framework against this encroaching historical recasting (see Connolly 2004). David Lloyd (1993), for example, and other contemporaries in the early-1990s such as Declan Kiberd (1996), Shakir Mustafa (1996), Luke Gibbons (1996), and those associated with the Field Day Theatre Company (see Eagleton, Jameson, and Said, 1990) agitated variously against the hegemonic "top-down elite histories" (Cleary 2022) of revisionist historiography, which sought to negate and depoliticise the "colonial" framework in favour of empiricism and so-called historical objectivity. Addressing the subject of colonialism, conversely, became paired with cultural nationalism, in a way that many literary theorists did not shirk, but nonetheless became perceived as an unpopular and unhelpful framework for understanding globalised Ireland in the emerging (neo)liberal, boom-time Republic and a tenuously Peace-time north.…”