Eamon Maher is Director of the National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies at the Institute of Technology, Tallaght. He is currently completing a monograph entitled ‘The Church and its Spire’: John McGahern and the Catholic Question.Eugene O’Brien is Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of English Language and Literature at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. His previous publications include ‘Kicking Bishop Brennan Up the Arse’: Negotiating Texts and Contexts in Contemporary Irish Studies (2009).

• Contents: Eamon Maher/Eugene O’Brien: Introduction – Jeanne I. Lakatos: The Semiotic Theory of Iconic Realism and Cultural Dissonance in de Meun’s and de Lorris’s Roman de la Rose and James Joyce’s Ulysses – Cathy McGlynn: ‘In the buginning is the woid’: Creation, Paternity and the Logos in Joyce’s Ulysses – Mary Pierse: The Donkey and the Sabbath – Sharon Tighe-Mooney: Exploring the Irish Catholic Mother in Kate O’Brien’s Pray for the Wanderer – Aintzane Legarreta Mentxaka: Catholic Agnostic - Kate O’Brien – James Silas Rogers: Edwin O’Connor’s Language of Grace – Eamon Maher: Issues of Faith in Selected Fiction by Brian Moore (1921-1999) – Peter Guy: ‘Earth’s Crammed with Heaven, and every Common Bush Afire with God’: Religion in the Fiction of John McGahern – Eugene O’Brien: ‘Any Catholics among you …?’: Seamus Heaney and the Real of Catholicism – John McDonagh: ‘Hopping Round Knock Shrine in the Falling Rain’: Revision and Catholicism in the Poetry of Paul Durcan – Victor Merriman: ‘To sleep is safe, to dream is dangerous’: Catholicism on Stage in Independent Ireland – Tony Corbett: Effing the Ineffable: Brian Friel’s Wonderful Tennessee and the Interrogation of Transcendence.