Anglo-Irish Modernism and the Maternal argues that a focus on the construction of mother-figures in Irish culture illuminates the extraordinary achievement of the Irish modernists. Essentially, the seminal Irish modernists—Moore, Joyce, Synge, Yeats, and O'Casey—resisted those mother-figures sanctioned by cultural discourses, re-writing her in order to elude her. In this, they not only re-constituted language and representation, they accessed and re-figured and their own creative sleves.