Description
Book SynopsisClaire Connolly offers a cultural history of the Irish novel in the period between the radical decade of the 1790s and the gaining of Catholic Emancipation in 1829. These decades saw the emergence of a group of talented Irish writers who developed and advanced such innovative forms as the national tale and the historical novel: fictions that took Ireland as their topic and setting and which often imagined its history via domestic plots that addressed wider issues of dispossession and inheritance. Their openness to contemporary politics, as well as to recent historiography, antiquarian scholarship, poetry, song, plays and memoirs, produced a series of notable fictions; marked most of all by their ability to fashion from these resources a new vocabulary of cultural identity. This book extends and enriches the current understanding of Irish Romanticism, blending sympathetic textual analysis of the fiction with careful historical contextualization.
Trade Review'… quietly provocative … the book makes an important foundational contribution to the field of Irish Gothic as well as Romantic studies … an exemplary study for scholars working in any language and national tradition.' Fiona Stafford, European Romantic Review
'Everywhere in this book we see lines for exciting new developments in Irish literary history … The book will no doubt become a critical touchstone and will helpfully reshape the study of the Irish novel for a long time to come.' Robert Brazeau, Irish Studies Review
'Connolly convincingly demonstrates the complexities of Irish Romantic novels in their engagements with Ireland's political union with Britain, and she uses various strategies to exemplify the dynamics between discourses of union and division in these texts … Connolly's work is highly commendable for the wide scope of texts that she incorporates into her argument, her revisionist reading of key works, and her reconsideration of prevalent assumptions about Irish Romantic novelists and their writings.' Marguerite Corporaal, Nineteenth-Century Contexts
Table of ContentsPreface; 1. Introduction: fact and fiction; 2. Landscape and map; 3. Love and marriage; 4. Catholics and Protestants; 5. Dead and alive.
