This groundbreaking collection examines popular and literary culture in the 1950s through the lens of postwar Ireland, from Samuel Beckett to Elvis Presley and Movement poetry to bestselling science fiction. The first book of its kind, it blends critical analysis with cultural memory of a unique time in the history of Irish literature.

Gerald Dawe is Professor of English, Director of the Oscar Wilde Centre and Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. His most recent publications include (2012) and (2011). Darryl Jones is Professor of English and Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. He has written and edited numerous books, most recently (with Elizabeth McCarthy and Bernice Murphy) and an edition of M. R. James’s . Nora Pelizzari is a PhD candidate in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin.

Contents: Thomas Kilroy: A Memoir of the 1950s – Nicholas Grene: Samuel Beckett: Waiting for the End – Darryl Jones: Fantasia: in the 1950s – Sam Slote: Elvis Presley: The Sun King – John Scattergood: The Movement: A Personal View – Eoin O’Brien: The Baggotonian Movement: Nevill Johnson (1911-1999) – Bernice M. Murphy: The Beautiful Stranger and the Inconceivable Alien: The Body Replacement Narrative in 1950s American Science Fiction – Helen Conrad O’Briain: Phyllis McGinley and the Liberal Heart – Edwina Keown: ‘Look at the pram products at their plotting and planning’: The Start of the British Teen Scene and Counter-Cultural Music in Colin MacInnes’s (1959) – Gerald Dawe: From and to : A Brief Look Back at the 1950s – Terence Brown: Afterword.