González-Arias, Luz Mar ed. 2017. National Identities and Imperfections in Contemporary Irish Literature: Unbecoming Irishness, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 248 Pages.

Luz Mar González-Arias’s collection, National Identities and Imper fections in Contemporar y Irish Literature: Unbecoming Irishness, brings together a number of essays presented at the X International AEDEI Conference, held at the University of Oviedo in May 2011. With a clear focus on contemporary issues, the book concerns itself specifically with Irish fiction from the very end of the 1990s onwards. Published by a major international press, González Arias’s volume is a most welcome addition to the field of Irish Studies in Spain. Thematically, the study –with its problematisation of canonical identities and its exploration of the marginal and dysfunctional aspects of Irish society– shares similarities with other recent collections edited by Spanish scholars: Marisol Morales-Ladrón’s Family and Dysfunction in Contemporar y Irish Narrative and Film (Peter Lang, 2016), Asier Altuna-García de Salazar’s Ireland and Dysfunction (Cambridge Scholars, 2017) and Pilar Villar-Argáiz’s Irishness on the Margins: Minority and Dissident Identities (Palgrave, 2018). It is a distinctive feature of the field of Irish Studies in Spain to concentrate almost entirely on contemporary writers and on issues of social justice and inclusion.