Reproduction of the original: Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama by E. Cobham Brewer

In this study, Charles Fanning has written the first general account of the origins and development of a literary tradition among American writers of Irish birth or background who have explored the Irish immigrant or ethnic experience in works of fiction. The result is a portrait of the evolving fictional self-consciousness of an immigrant group over a span of 250 years. Fanning traces the roots of Irish-American writing back to the eighteenth century and carries it forward through the traumatic years of the Famine to the present time with an intensely productive period in the twentieth century beginning with James T. Farrell. Later writers treated in depth include Edwin O'Connor, Elizabeth Cullinan, Maureen Howard, and William Kennedy. Along the way he places in the historical record many all but forgotten writers, including the prolific Mary Ann Sadlier. The Irish Voice in America is not only a highly readable contribution to American literary history but also a valuable reference to many writers and their works. For this second edition, Fanning has added a chapter that covers the fiction of the past decade. He argues that contemporary writers continue to draw on Ireland as a source and are important chroniclers of the modern American experience.

This volume considers the work and life of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851). It looks not only at Frankenstein and its composition, sources, themes and reception but at the wide range of other work by Shelley including such novels as The Last Man and Mathilda and her tales, reviews, travel writing and the (until recently neglected) Literary Lives of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French writers. There are detailed entries on her personal and/or literary relationship with her parents Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron, Coleridge and Claire Clairmont; on her religion, feminism, politics, relation to Romanticism, portraits and representation in drama, film and television; and on the influence of her work on such writers as Poe, Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontës, Dickens and H.G. Wells.