The years between 1780 and 1830 are vital decades in the history of Irish writing in English. This book charts the confluence of Enlightenment, antiquarian, and romantic energies within Irish literary culture and shows how different writers and genres absorbed, dispersed and remade those interests during five decades of political change. During those same years, literature made its own history. By the 1840s, Irish writing formed a recognizable body of work, which later generations would draw on, quote, anthologize and dispute. Questions raised by novels, poems and plays of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - the politics of language and voice; the relationship between literature and locality; the possibility of literature as a profession - resonated for many Irish writers over the centuries that followed and continue to matter today. This comprehensive volume will be a key reference for scholars and students of Irish literature and romantic literary studies.

The years between 1780 and 1830 are vital decades in the history of Irish writing in English. This book charts the confluence of Enlightenment, antiquarian, and romantic energies within Irish literary culture and shows how different writers and genres absorbed, dispersed and remade those interests during five decades of political change. During those same years, literature made its own history. By the 1840s, Irish writing formed a recognizable body of work, which later generations would draw on, quote, anthologize and dispute. Questions raised by novels, poems and plays of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - the politics of language and voice; the relationship between literature and locality; the possibility of literature as a profession - resonated for many Irish writers over the centuries that followed and continue to matter today. This comprehensive volume will be a key reference for scholars and students of Irish literature and romantic literary studies.

This volume examines eighteenth-century Irish literature, highlighting the diversity of texts, authors and approaches that characterises contemporary studies of the period. Chapters consider the contexts of history, politics, language, philosophy, gender, sexuality, and the environment while situating Irish literature in relation to Ireland, Britain, Europe and beyond. Well-known authors (Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke and Oliver Goldsmith) are read alongside less familiar writers (including Mary Barber, William Chaigneau, Frances Sheridan, and Samuel Whyte) and popular and ephemeral literatures take their place with formerly canonical texts. It demonstrates the exciting vitality and richness of eighteenth-century Irish literature - written and performed - as well as its complex intersections with different communities and traditions. This book will be a key resource to scholars and students of Irish eighteenth-century studies as well as readers generally interested in questions of Anglophone and Irish-language culture, representations of gender and sexuality, and national and trans-national identities.

This volume explores the history of Irish writing between the Second World War (or the 'Emergency') in 1939 and the re-emergence of violence in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. It situates modern Irish writing within the contexts of cultural transition and transnational connection, often challenging pre-existing perceptions of Irish literature in this period as stagnant and mundane. While taking into account the grip of Irish censorship and cultural nationalism during the mid-twentieth century, these essays identify an Irish literary culture stimulated by international political horizons and fully responsive to changes in publishing, readership, and education. The book combines valuable cultural surveys with focussed discussions of key literary moments, and of individual authors such as Seán O'Faoláin, Samuel Beckett, Edna O'Brien, and John McGahern.

The years between 1880 and 1940 were a time of unprecedented literary production and political upheaval in Ireland. It is the era of the 1916 Easter Rising, the Irish Revival, and a time when many major Irish writers - Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Lady Gregory - profoundly impacted Irish and World Literature. Recent research has uncovered new archives of previously neglected texts and authors. Organized according to multiple categories, ranging from single author to genre and theme, this volume allows readers to imagine multiple ways of re-mapping this crucial period. The book incorporates different, even competing, approaches and interpretations to reflect emerging trends and current debates in contemporary scholarship. As ongoing research in the field of Irish studies discovers new materials and critical strategies for interpreting them, our sense of Irish literary history during this period is constantly shifting. This volume seeks to capture the richness and complexity of the years 1880-1940 for our current moment.

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.

From Gaelic annals and medieval poetry to contemporary Irish literature, A History of Irish Literature and the Environment examines the connections between the Irish environment and Irish literary culture. Themes such as Ireland's island ecology, the ecological history of colonial-era plantation and deforestation, the Great Famine, cultural attitudes towards animals and towards the land, the postcolonial politics of food and energy generation, and the Covid-19 pandemic - this book shows how these factors determine not only a history of the Irish environment but also provide fresh perspectives from which to understand and analyze Irish literature. An international team of contributors provides a comprehensive analysis of Irish literature to show how the literary has always been deeply engaged with environmental questions in Ireland, a crucial new perspective in an age of climate crisis. A History of Irish Literature and the Environment reveals the socio-cultural, racial, and gendered aspects embedded in questions of the Irish environment.

Offering an in-depth overview and reappraisal of the 1860s in British literature, this innovative volume features in-depth analyses from noted scholars at the tops of their fields. Covering characteristic literary genres of the 1860s (including sensation and lyric, as well as Golden Age children's literature), and topics of current and enduring interest in the field, from empire and slavery to evolution, environmental issues and economics, it incorporates drama as well as poetry and fiction, and emphasizes the history of publishing and periodicals so important to the period. Chapters are attentive to the global context, from Ireland on the stage, to Bengali literature, to Britain's muted response to the US Civil War. The Introduction gives an overview that places these individual chapters in the historical context of the 1860s, as well as the current scholarly conversation in the field.

What does religion mean to modern Ireland and what is its recent social and political history? The Oxford Handbook of Religion in Modern Ireland provides in-depth analysis of the relationships between religion, society, politics, and everyday life on the island of Ireland from 1800 to the twenty-first century. Taking a chronological and all-island approach, it explores the complex and changing role of religion both before and after partition. The handbook's thirty-two chapters address long-standing historical and political debates about religion, identity, and politics, including religion's contributions to division and violence. They also offer perspectives on how religion interacts with education, the media, law, gender and sexuality, science, literature, and memory. Whilst providing insight into how everyday religious practices have intersected with the institutional structures of Catholicism and Protestantism, the book also examines the island's increasing religious diversity, including the rise of those with 'no religion'. Written by leading scholars in the field and emerging researchers with new perspectives, this is an authoritative and up-to-date volume that offers a wide-ranging and comprehensive survey of the enduring significance of religion on the island.

The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose is a full-length essay collection devoted entirely to British Romantic nonfiction prose. Organized into eight parts, each containing between five and nine chapters arranged alphabetically, the Handbook weaves together familiar and unfamiliar texts, events, and authors, and invites readers to draw comparisons, reimagine connections and disconnections, and confront frequently stark contradictions, within British Romantic nonfiction prose, but also in its relationship to British Romanticism more generally, and to the literary practices and cultural contexts of other periods and countries. The Handbook builds on previous scholarship in the field, considers emerging trends and evolving methodologies, and suggests future areas of study. Throughout the emphasis is on lucid expression rather than gnomic declaration, and on chapters that offer, not a dutiful survey, but evaluative assessments that keep an eye on the bigger picture yet also dwell meaningfully on specific paradoxes and the most telling examples. Taken as a whole the volume demonstrates the energy, originality, and diversity at the crux of British Romantic nonfiction prose. It vigorously challenges the traditional construction of the British Romantic movement as focused too exclusively on the accomplishments of its poets, and it reveals the many ways in which scholars of the period are steadily broadening out and opening up delineations of British Romanticism in order to encompass and thoroughly evaluate the achievements of its nonfiction prose writers.