Ireland's footing within the United Kingdom in the period between Edmund Burke's last years and the generation of Yeats and Joyce, was unique and anomalous: in social terms this was evident in the prestige of the Protestant Ascendancy; and in literary terms in the values accorded to the notion of tradition. This study uncovers the bourgeois origins of Ascendancy ideology in the alarm of the 1790s, and traces its cultural significance by means of a series of detailed critiques of central texts and concepts.