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 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.

With characteristic lawlessness and connection to the common man, the figure of the rogue commanded the world of Irish fiction from 1660 to 1790. During this period of development for the Irish novel, this archetypal figure appears over and over again. Early Irish fiction combined the picaresque genre, focusing on a cunning, witty trickster or pícaro, with the escapades of real and notorious criminals. On the one hand, such rogue tales exemplified the English stereotypes of an unruly Ireland, but on the other, they also personified Irish patriotism. Existing between the dual publishing spheres of London and Dublin, the rogue narrative explored the complexities of Anglo-Irish relations. In this volume, Lines investigates why writers during the long eighteenth-century so often turned to the rogue narrative to discuss Ireland. Alongside recognized works of Irish fiction, such as those by William Chaigneau, Richard Head, and Charles Johnston, Lines presents lesser-known and even anonymous popular texts. With consideration for themes of conflict, migration, religion, and gender, Lines offers up a compelling connection between the rogues themselves, marked by persistence and adaptability, and the ever-popular rogue narrative in this early period of Irish writing.

'Rethinking British Romantic History, 1770-1845' brings together a team of leading scholars to examine the interactions between history and literature in the Romantic period, focusing on practical as well as theoretical interconnections between the two genres and disciplines.

Intro -- Series Editor's Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Part I Necessary and Unnecessary Anachronisms -- Chapter 1 Realism and the Institution of the Nineteenth-Century Novel -- Part II Forgetting and Remembrance -- Chapter 2 William Carleton's and Charles Kickham's Ethnographic Realism -- Chapter 3 George Eliot's Anachronistic Literacies -- Part III Untimely Improvement -- Chapter 4 Charles Dickens's Reactionary Reform -- Chapter 5 George Moore's Untimely Bildung -- Coda: Inhabiting Institutions -- Bibliography -- Index.

This book focuses on Ireland’s lived experience of tuberculosis as represented in the nation’s fiction; not surprisingly, the disease both manifests and conceals itself with devastating frequency in literature as it did in life. It seeks to place the history of tuberculosis in Ireland, from 1800 until after its virtual eradication in the mid-Twentieth Century, in conversation with fictional representations or repressions of a condition so fearsome that until very recently it was usually referred to by code words and euphemisms rather than by its name.

This Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of British Romantic literature and an authoritative guide to all aspects of the movement including its historical, cultural, and intellectual contexts, and its connections with the literature and thought of other countries. All the major Romantic writers are covered alongside lesser known writers.

The handbook offers a comprehensive introduction to the British novel in the long eighteenth century, when this genre emerged to develop into the period’s most versatile and popular literary form. Part I features six systematic chapters that discuss literary, intellectual, socio-economic, and political contexts, providing innovative approaches to issues such as sense and sentiment, gender considerations, formal characteristics, economic history, enlightened and radical concepts of citizenship and human rights, ecological ramifications, and Britain’s growing global involvement. Part II presents twenty-five analytical chapters that attend to individual novels, some canonical and others recently recovered. These analyses engage the debates outlined in the systematic chapters, undertaking in-depth readings that both contextualize the works and draw on relevant criticism, literary theory, and cultural perspectives. The handbook’s breadth and depth, clear presentation, and lucid language make it attractive and accessible to scholar and student alike.