The subaltern aesthethical approach of this book has emphasised the importance of considering the ethos — the specific material positions and conditions of the subaltern in contemporary Irish, Northern Irish and Scottish literatures. This has been the basis for assessing to what extent, and in what form, the texts selected for discussion have enabled or foreclosed a space in which to make audible and visible, to explore and to challenge what I have called subaltern issues of disempowerment, oppression and suffering, pertaining to the aspects of class and gender in particular. The texts I have chosen differ in important ways but there are also strong affinities and solidarities that are traceable in renegotiating Irish-Scottish comparative studies in forms that refuse the primacy of nationalism.