ABSTRACT
Is there such a thing as unionist literature? Thanks to the genius of Yeats, and the remarkable talent of many of his friends and contemporaries around the time of the home rule debates, the literary aspects of Irish nationalism have been frequently acknowledged and exhaustively studied.1 But unionist literature is a less promising prospect. One problem is that there are too many different unionisms, ranging from the Liberal unionism of the historian W.E.H. Lecky, MP for Dublin University (1895-1902), or the aristocratic Anglo-Irish conservatism of Lord Ernest Hamilton, MP for North Tyrone (1885-92), son of the Duke of Abercorn and author of The Soul of Ulster (1917), to the militant truculence parodied in the Belfast industrialist Cahoon or the machine-gun-toting McConkey, foreman of the Green Loaney Scutching Mill, in George Birmingham’s satirical novel The Red Hand of Ulster (1912).
