Drawing on diverse cultural forms, and ranging across disciplinary boundaries, Nation States maps the contested cultural terrain of Irish nationalism from the Act of Union of 1800 to the present. In looking at Irish nationalism as a site of struggle, Mays examines both the myriad ways in which the nation fashions itself as the a priori ground of identity, and those processes through which nationalism engenders an ostensibly unique national identity corresponding to one and only one nation-state, the place where we always have been, and can only ever be, 'at home.'

By Michael Mays

Chapter 1 Introduction: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Irish Culture
Chapter 2 National Memory and Postcolonial Nonsense
Chapter 3 "A Nation Once Again"?: The Dislocations and Displacements of Irish Nationalist Memory
Chapter 4 The Ends of Cultural Nationalism and the Limits of Nationalist Culture
Chapter 5 Ourselves Alone?
Chapter 6 Homeland
Chapter 7 The Troubled State
Chapter 8 Afterword: Irish Identity in an Age of Globalization