Joe Cleary is Lecturer in English at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth where he teaches Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Literary Theory, and Renaissance Drama. He has published widely on Irish literature and film and on contemporary political and cultural theory in books and journals such as The South Atlantic Quarterly and Textual Practice.

• Acknowledgments; Preface; Part I: 1. Ireland, Palestine and the antinomies of self-determination in the 'Badlands of Modernity'; 2. Estranged states: national literatures, modernity and tradition, and the elaboration of partitionist identities; Part II: 3. 'Forked-Tongued on the Border Pitt': partition and the politics of form in contemporary narratives of the Northern Irish conflict; 4. Agonies of the potentates: journeys to the frontier in the novels of Amos Oz; 5. The meaning of disaster: the novel and the stateless nation in Ghassan Kanafani's Men in the Sun.

'This book is strikingly original … Joe Cleary restores to literary analysis cultural and political dimensions that it had lost. This is a groundbreaking book by a remarkably gifted and powerful writer.' Seamus Deane