Irishness And Womanhood In Nineteenth Century British Writing

In The Wild Irish Girl, the powerful Irish heroine's marriage to a heroic Englishman symbolizes the Anglo-Irish novelist Lady Morgan's re-imagining of the relationship between Ireland and Britain and between men and women. Using this most influential of pro-union novels as his point of departure, the author argues that nineteenth-century debates over what constitutes British national identity often revolved around representations of Irishness, especially Irish womanhood. He maps out the genealogy of this development, from Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent through Trollope's Irish novels, focusing on the pivotal period from 1806 through the 1870s. The author's model enables him to elaborate the ways in which gender ideals are specifically contested in fiction, the discourses of political debate and social reform, and the popular press, for the purpose of defining not only the place of the Irish in the union with Great Britain, but the nature of Britishness itself.

Central to literary, social and political writings of nineteenth-century Ireland are arguments regarding men and women's proper spheres. This pioneering volume examines the significance of gender in shaping public and private life during a century of complex and changing power relations. The interdisciplinary character of the collection ensures a rich variety of perspectives.

This book examines ideas of Irishness in the writing of Mary McCarthy, Maeve Brennan, Alice McDermott, Alice Munro, Jane Urquhart, and Emma Donoghue. Individual chapters engage in detail with questions central to the social or literary history of Irish women in North America and pay special attention to the following: discourses of Irish femininity in twentieth-century American and Canadian literature; mythologies of Irishness in an American and Canadian context; transatlantic literary exchanges and the influence of canonical Irish writers; and ideas of exile in the work of diasporic women writers.

This volume charts the rise of professional women writers across diverse fields of intellectual enquiry and through different modes of writing in the period immediately before and during the reign of Queen Victoria. It demonstrates how, between 1830 and 1880, the woman writer became an agent of cultural formation and contestation, appealing to and enabling the growth of female readership while issuing a challenge to the authority of male writers and critics. Of especial importance were changing definitions of marriage, family and nation, of class, and of morality as well as new conceptions of sexuality and gender, and of sympathy and sensation. The result is a richly textured account of a radical and complex process of feminization whereby formal innovations in the different modes of writing by women became central to the aesthetic, social, and political formation of British culture and society in the nineteenth century.

Presented in a comprehensive and accessible manner, this work examines how these women radically altered the public perception of women's role on society. Their achievements included persuading Trinity College, Dublin to admit women to the exam system, the establishment of the Ladies' Land League, the foundation of the outdoor system of child rearing as well as the setting up of a network of city poor schools. They were also responsible for initiating changes in the legislation under which Irish women were subject to the authority of their husbands for exposing problems like wife abuse, and for abolishing the degrading practices associated with female emigrant trade towards the end of the nineteenth century.

These new essays by leading scholars explore nineteenth-century women's writing across a spectrum of genres. The book's focus is on women's role in and access to literary culture in the broadest sense, as consumers and interpreters as well as practitioners of that culture. Individual chapters consider women as journalists, editors, translators, scholars, actresses, playwrights, autobiographers, biographers, writers for children and religious writers as well as novelists and poets. A unique chronology offers a woman-centered perspective on literary and historical events and there is a guide to further reading.

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.

Building on the long-standing image of Paris as the "Capital of the Nineteenth Century" and the "Capital of Modernity," this book examines the city's place in the imagination of Irish women writers in the long nineteenth century. By reasserting the centrality of Paris, this book draws connections between Irish and European writers, expanding the map of Irish Studies and forging new points of contact between Irish literature and canonical figures like Goethe, Balzac, and Zola through the shared interest in the socio-economic development of modernity.