A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790–1829

A fresh account of Irish Romanticism and the Irish novel in turbulent political times.

Claire Connolly (Author)

9781107009516, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 November 2011

288 pages
23.5 x 16 x 1.5 cm, 0.6 kg

'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

Claire 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.

Preface
1. Introduction: fact and fiction
2. Landscape and map
3. Love and marriage
4. Catholics and Protestants
5. Dead and alive.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: general [DSB]