The British context has been a controversial area for those involved in Irish literature and Irish studies. Behind the present volume lies a search for a view from which the frame of the British context as well as the dichotomy between British and Irish literature can be dismantled and disrupted in a most creative sense. It addresses the question of Irish literature's intrinsic openness by first focusing on the British context that affected Irish literary production through three centuries and then looking beyond it towards the European or global context that lay behind Irish modernism. The book further extends its research to modern Irish poetry and discusses three prominent poets after W.B. Yeats whose works are in and beyond the British context in each different way. Providing unique and new perspectives that have been evolved mostly from an international conference held in Kyoto, Japan, this collection attempts to reassess and explore the values of Irish literature in a global context.