Irish Novelists And The Victorian Age

This is the first comprehensive study of the Irish writers of the Victorian age, some of them still remembered, most of them now forgotten. Their work was often directed to a British as well as an Irish reading audience and was therefore disparaged in the era of W.B. Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival with its culturally nationalist agenda. This study is based on a reading of around 370 novels by 150 authors, including still-familiar novelists such as William Carleton, the peasant writer who wielded much influence, and Charles Lever, whose serious work was destroyed by the slur of 'rollicking', as well as Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, George Moore, Emily Lawless, Somerville and Ross, Bram Stoker, and three of the leading authors from the new-woman movement, Sarah Grand, Iota, and George Egerton. James H. Murphy examines the work of these and many other writers in a variety of contexts: the political, economic, and cultural developments of the time; the vicissitudes of the reading audience; the realities of a publishing industry that was for the most part London-based; the often difficult circumstances of the lives of the novelists; and the ever changing genre of the novel itself, to which Irish authors often made a contribution. Politics, history, religion, gender and, particularly, land, over which nineteenth-century Ireland was deeply divided, featured as key themes for fiction. Finally, the book engages with the critical debate of recent times concerning the supposed failure of realism in the nineteenth-century Irish novel, looking for more specific causes than have hitherto been offered and discovering occasions on which realism turned out to be possible.

A fresh new reassessment of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-73), one of the bestselling Irish novelists of the mid-Victorian period, who is recognized today for his ghost stories and tales of psychological terror, including In a Glass Darkly and The Wyvern Mystery."This excellent study...is far more than a revelation of Le Fanu, though this is incidentally provided in a discriminating and scholarly way...Dr. McCormack illuminates the more private and tortured universe of Le Fanu himself". -- Times Literary Supplement

This text is a comprehensive study of fiction written by Irish authors during the Victorian age. James Murphy analyses the development of the novel in Ireland and examines the work of authors including William Carleton, Charles Lever, Somerville and Ross, and Bram Stoker in the social and literary contexts of their times.

Studies of Irish fiction are still scanty in contrast to studies of Irish poetry and drama. Attempting to fill a large critical vacancy, Irish Novels 1890-1940 is a comprehensive survey of popular and minor fiction (mainly novels) published between 1890 and 1922, a crucial period in Irish cultural and political history. Since the bulk of these sixty-odd writers have never been written about, certainly beyond brief mentions, the book opens up for further exploration a literary landscape, hitherto neglected, perhaps even unsuspected. This new landscape should alter the familiar perspectives on Irish literature of the period, first of all by adding genre fiction (science fiction, detective novels, ghost stories, New Woman fiction, and Great War novels) to the Irish syllabus, secondly by demonstrating the immense contribution of women writers to popular and mainstream Irish fiction. Among the popular and prolific female writers discussed are Mrs J.H. Riddell, B.M. Croker, M.E. Francis, Sarah Grand, Katharine Tynan, Ella MacMahon, Katherine Cecil Thurston, W.M. Letts, and Hannah Lynch. Indeed, a critical inference of the survey is that if there is a discernible tradition of the Irish novel, it is largely a female tradition. A substantial postscript surveys novels by Irish women between 1922 and1940 and relates them to the work of their female antecedents. This ground-breaking survey should also alter the familiar perspectives on the Ireland of 1890-1922. Many of the popular works were problem-novels and hence throw light on contemporary thinking and debate on the 'Irish Question'. After the Irish Literary Revival and creation of the Free State, much popular and mainstream fiction became a lost archive, neglected evidence, indeed, of a lost Ireland.

Ireland's experience in the nineteenth century was quite different from that of Victorian Britain. Its fictions were written in differing forms - like the gothic or historical novel - and its poetry and drama were populated with ballad and song. Its writers were by turns nationalist or unionist, anglophile or de-anglicising. If the effects of Famine and emigration were catastrophic for mid-nineteenth-century Irish culture, they initiated a literary story that spread across the diaspora. Despite the decline of spoken Irish, literature continued to be published, while scholarly endeavours such as translation or the Ordnance Survey preserved much from the Gaelic past. This rich volume examines the many forms of new writing that thrived throughout this period. Utilizing a thematic and historical approach, it addresses a broad anglophone readership in Victorian literature. Essays consider the Irish authors in America and India, women's writing, and the resilience of Irish literature before the revival.

The representation of the Irish in English canonical fictions was to have been the subject of this monograph. The editor realised the enormity of the task and limited the present volume to an overview of the Irish, Irish authors and Ireland in English literature.

Examines the works and careers of the principal Irish novelists of the early 19th century, including; Edgeworth, Morgan, Banim, Griffin and Carleton. Also looks at the history of the time in terms of political, social, and religious aspects.