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> > anyhow, i'm teaching a course on irish lit next january and am loading the > > first half heavily with modernists. but after beckett i get a bit stuck. > >> i'll be very grateful for any ideas > > > > many thanks > > > > stuart allen Hello Stuart - apologies for riding on the back of your query but your request has just sparked a thought which has been nagging away at the back of mind for some time now. There are many-many studies and seminars and think tanks and anthologies of Irish poetry and the Welsh and Scots have their own considerable thing going. But the English - as an ethnic group - are rarely considered on their own. So, for example, one upshot of this is that the countries surrounding England (or, in the case of the Scotland ruling England! ) have their own anthologies which us downtrodden English are not allowed to be part of but the ones we are allowed to be part of - well - we have to share with the Irish (and not just the Northern Irish!) the Scots and the Welsh. Now apart from being insanely jealous at all the attention that lot are getting I think there is actually a genuine oversight going on here. The huge change in social economic and class structures has 'allowed' (fought for at Peterloo and on the picket lines) a whole generation and gender of English kids from none mid/upper classes to strut their stuff - almost coinciding with a whole generation of second generation born here English kids from the Carrabean and Asia and Poland, and etc against a backdrop of the old university cliques and the occasional breakaway wild-child. What a subject for a young academic - something that no one else has given a damn about - or is that that the subject is still too touchy - is it still too early to be able to say you're English (if you're white) without it being taken as a statement of racial prejudice or branded a National Fronter. Or is it just too complex. Or has it been written about at length and I was too busy reading about the buggering(s) about of the royal butler and all things beginnig with B, Carry on up the Khyber, G.