The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature offers a fresh new look at the origins of literary modernism in Ireland. arguing that the roots of Irish modernism lie in the attempt by the Survey to produce a comprehensive archive of a land emerging rapidly into modernity. The Survey, for Parsons, is one of the "many possible and actual starting points of a history of Irish modernity and modernism," and what emerges in the book is a brilliant and fresh analysis of the ways in which James Clarence Mangan, John Millington Synge, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett engage with such a cartographical heritage and postcolonial imperative.