Foreword Declan Kiberd; Introduction Michael Pierse; 1. Writing and theorising the Irish working class David Convery; 2. Representing labour: notes towards a political and cultural economy of Irish working-class experience Christopher J. V. Loughlin; 3. Working-class writing in Ireland before 1800: 'some must be poor – we cannot all be great' Andrew Carpenter; 4. 'We wove our ain wab': the Ulster Weaver poets' working lives, myths and afterlives Frank Ferguson; 5. Sub-literatures?: Folk song, memory and Ireland's working poor John Moulden; 6. Writing working-class Irish women Heather Laird; 7. 'Unwriting' the city: narrating class in early twentieth-century Belfast and Dublin (1900–1929) Elizabeth Mannion; 8. Class during the Irish revolution: British soldiers, 1916, and the abject body James Moran; 9. 'An sinne a bhí sa chónra?' – Writing death on the margins in twentieth-century Irish working-class writing Michael Pierse; 10. Writing Irish nurses in Britain Tony Muray; 11. The view from below: solidarity and struggle in Irish-American working-class literature Margaret Hallissy and John Lutz; 12. Irish working-class writing in Australasia, 1860–1960: contrasts and comparisons Peter Kuch; 13. Irish working-class poetry 1900–1960 Niall Carson; 14. 'A system that inflicts suffering upon the many' Paul Delaney; 15. Drama, 1900–1950 Paul Murphy; 16. Seán O'Casey and Brendan Behan: aesthetics, democracy, and the voice of labour John Brannigan; 17. Reshaping well-worn genres: novels of progress and precarity 1960–1998 Mary McGlynn; 18. Locked out: working-class lives in Irish drama 1958–1998 Victor Merriman; 19. Poetry and the working class in Northern Ireland during the troubles Adam Hanna; 20. Class politics and performance in troubles drama: 'history isn't over yet' Mark Phelan; 21. Twentieth-century workers' biography Claire Lynch; 22. Multiple class consciousnesses in writings for theatre during the Celtic Tiger Era Eamonn Jordan; Afterword overdue: the recovery and study of Irish working-class writing, an international perspective H. Gustav Klaus.