Parallel Visions, Confluent Worlds

The Republic of Ireland left the British Commonwealth in 1949. It was traditionally overlooked by developing trends of Commonwealth literary studies from the 1960s, which tended to examine the cultural production of countries still under Commonwealth rule. From the late 1980s onwards, however, scholars of Irish literature and indeed across postcolonial studies have examined Ireland's unique and comparative literary, historical, cultural and geographical features in relation to the contexts of broader postcolonial debates.