1. Samuel Beckett
‘It truly is magnificent and a treasure, if you like it—quite useless to you, quite idiotic if you don’t’ - according to Kate O’Brien in a contemporary review of Beckett’s Murphy. What do you consider to be the value and significance of the novel? Give some account of plot, characters and treatment in offering your appraisal.

2. Flann O’Brien
O’Brien told his publisher: ‘Briefly, the story I have in mind opens as a very orthodox murder mystery in a rural district.’ How far does this describe The Third Policeman? What else do you find in the novel besides ‘a very orthodox murder mystery’?

3. Liam O’Flaherty
‘The Irish experience of Great Famine included a century-long collective amnesia’ (Maureen Murphy). Describe the ways in which Liam O’Flaherty’s novel Famine characterises the main historical players in that event and resolves the national trauma associated with it.

4. Kate O’Brien
‘How simple! How formal and civilised was the method of the Church [...] Self would thin away if one pursued the idea of God.’ (The Ante-Room) Describe Agnes Mulqueen’s moral history and give your estimate of Kate O’Brien’s depiction of it in the novel.

5. John Banville
‘Neither history not fantasy but an imaginative combination of both for specifically literary and aesthetic purposes’: give a reading of John Banville’s novel Birchwood which offers an endorsement or a refutation of this statement.

6. John Montague & Seamus Heaney
Write an essay on a ‘sense of place’ in the poetry of John Montague and Seamus Heaney, giving a clear account of what is meant by that term along with instances of it from the poetry. (You may place more emphasis on one or other in your answer.)

7. Michael Longley & Derek Mahon
‘If Montague and Heaney have refashioned the nationalist tradition of Irish poetry in our time, Longley and Mahon represent an alternative tradition for which nature and being, not nation and identity, are the prime objects of attention.’ Discuss this statement with with reference to one or more closely examined poems by one or both of these Ulster-born poets.

8. Contemporary women’s poetry
In what ways have their gender and/or Irishness shaped the poetry of Medbh McGuckian and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill? Illustrate your answer with close reference to several individual poems. (You may concentrate on one or the other poet in your answer.)

9. Contemporary fiction
Give an account of ANY TWO novels by Jennifer Johnston, Colm Toibín, Emma Donoghue or Patrick McCabe (i.e., one by each author), comparing their themes and treatment and offering an estimate of the merits of the writers on the basis of features identified in your essay.