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.

Product Description: Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) was an Anglo-Irish novelist. She was born at Black Bourton, Oxfordshire, the second child of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, a well-known author and inventor. On her father's second marriage in 1773, she went with him to Ireland, where she eventually was to settle on his estate, Edgeworthstown, in County Longford...read more

Product Description: A new kind of writing about Irish culture has emerged in recent years, the best examples of which are gathered in this volume. Joining political, linguistic, social, and historical approaches to culture, these essays have substantially altered the critical climate of Irish Studies...read more