Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett (1878-1957), eighteenth Baron Dunsany in the peerage of Ireland?usually known as Lord Dunsany?continues to be admired by devotees of fantasy fiction, but he receives little attention in Irish Studies. His Orientalist fantasies articulate a defiantly aristocratic aesthetic, based on game playing?including war and hunting?as well as on the privi leging of the storytelling process over truth or meaning, and on a love of ornamentation for its own sake. As such, his aesthetic has, perhaps unexpect edly, something in common with postmodernism. And yet, for an author most renowned as a fantasist, the real world of the Ireland in which he lived and worked is consistently present in his oeuvre. Dunsany's portrayal of Ireland, shot through with diehard Unionism, com bines sardonic observations on the silences and hypocrisies of the new state with a wistful attraction to its peasant illusions; Dunsany's version of imperialism in Ireland saw the system not as a pathway to modernity, but rather, as a means of preserving feudal values that were disappearing from Britain itself. As in his depictions of India and Africa, he clings to the dream of empire even as he dis cards the claims to social progress and religious superiority that originally underwrote the dream. In doing so, he highlights the tensions between reac tionary and progressivist visions of imperialism. Dunsany was born in London on July 24,1878, the elder son of John Plun kett, a Conservative MP. (Most Irish peers did not sit in the House of Lords; they could represent British?not Irish?seats in the Commons.) He spent his child hood at his mother's home, Dunstall Priory in Shoreham, in Southeast Kent. Dunsany's education intensified his sense of his Kent childhood as a lost par adise. His father, who died in 1899, wished him to become a soldier: Dunsany was sent to Cheam Preparatory School and to Eton, where his dreamy nature made him unpopular, before entering the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. In 1899 he became a lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards, and was stationed in Gibraltar, his first glimpse of the East. After World War I, Dunsany recalled the