Best to start, perhaps, with Modernism and its legacies. It is the ambiguous fate of the contemporary Irish writer to find herself working in a literary tradition shaped in part by Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, and Samuel Beckett – whose names, listed in that order, constitute a capsule history of Modernism as such (from 1890s Aestheticism to 1950s Absurdism).
