Exploring the effects of traveling, migration, and other forms of cultural contact, particularly within Europe, this edited collection explores the act of traveling and the representation of traveling by Irish men and women from diverse walks of life in the period between Grattan’s Parliament (1782) and World War I (1914). This was a period marked by an increasing physical and cultural mobility of Irish throughout Britain, Continental Europe, the Americas, and the Pacific. Travel was undertaken for a variety of reasons: during the Romantic period, the ‘Grand Tour’ and what is now sometimes referred to as medical tourism brought Irish artists and intellectuals to Europe, where cultural exchanges with other writers, artists, and thinkers inspired them to introduce novel ideas and cultural forms to their Irish audiences. Showing this impact of the nineteenth-century Irish across national borders and their engagement with global cultural and linguistic traditions, the volume will provide novel insights into the transcultural spheres of the arts, literature, politics, and translation in which they were active.

“Don’t women with children travel?” Marybeth Bond and Pamela Michael enquire, in their book A Mother’s World: Journeys of the Heart (1998), when discovering the absence of portrayals of travelling mothers. Addressing this absence, our book Travellin’ Mama: Mothers, Mothering and Travel explores the multiple dimensions of motherhood and travel. Through a variety of compelling creative pieces and critical essays with a global outlook and wide-ranging historical, cultural, and national perspectives, Travellin’ Mama: Mothers, Mothering and Travel examines the vital contributions made to travel writing and representations of travel by mothers. Autoethnographical approaches inform many of the pieces in this book, illustrating the significance of the personal and writing the self in re-imagining our cultural narratives and representations of travel, and the mothers who undertake it. This book is about mothers who travel, for mothers who travel with their children, and all those readers who have travelled in any capacity, with or without family.

At the time of her death in 1962, Kathleen M. Murphy was recognized as “the most widely and most knowledgeably travelled Irish woman of her time . . . insofar as she let herself be known to the public at all.” An abiding interest in sacred sites and ancient civilizations took Murphy down the Amazon and over the Andes, into the jungles of Southeast Asia and onto the deserts of the Middle East, above the Arctic Circle and behind the Iron Curtain. After the Second World War, Murphy began publishing a series of vivid, humorous, and often harrowing accounts of her travels in The Capuchin Annual, a journal reaching a largely Catholic and nationalist audience in Ireland and the United States. At home in the Irish midlands, Murphy may have been a modest and retiring figure, but her travelogues shuttle between religious devotion and searching curiosity, primitivist assumptions and probing insights, gender decorum and bold adventuring. Unaccompanied Traveler, with its wide-ranging introduction, detailed notes, and eye-catching maps, retrieves these remarkable accounts from obscurity and presents them to a new generation of readers interested in travel and adventure.

This book argues that a vibrant, ever-changing Atlantic community persisted into the nineteenth century. As in the early modern Atlantic world, nineteenth-century interactions between the Americas, Africa, and Europe centered on exchange: exchange of people, commodities, and ideas. From 1789 to 1914, new means of transportation and communication allowed revolutionaries, migrants, merchants, settlers, and tourists to crisscross the ocean, share their experiences, and spread knowledge. Extending the conventional chronology of Atlantic world history up to the start of the First World War, Niels Eichhorn uncovers the complex dynamics of transition and transformation that marked the nineteenth-century Atlantic world.

With the rise of mass tourism, Italy became increasingly accessible to Victorian women travellers not only as a locus of artistic culture but also as a site of political enquiry. Despite being outwardly denied a political voice in Britain, many female tourists were conspicuous in their commitment to the Italian campaign for national independence, or Risorgimento (1815–61). Revisiting Italy brings several previously unexamined travel accounts by women to light during a decisive period in this political campaign. Revealing the wider currency of the Risorgimento in British literature, Butler situates once-popular but now-marginalized writers: Clotilda Stisted, Janet Robertson, Mary Pasqualino, Selina Bunbury, Margaret Dunbar and Frances Minto Elliot alongside more prominent figures: the Shelley-Byron circle, the Brownings, Florence Nightingale and the Kemble sisters. Going beyond the travel book, she analyses a variety of forms of travel writing including unpublished letters, privately printed accounts and periodical serials. Revisiting Italy focuses on the convergence of political advocacy, gender ideologies, national identity and literary authority in women’s travel writing. Whether promoting nationalism through a maternal lens, politicizing the pilgrimage motif or reviving gothic representations of a revolutionary Italy, it identifies shared touristic discourses as temporally contingent, shaped by commercial pressures and the volatile political climate at home and abroad.

This book explores contemporary children’s and young adult novels writing back to history and oppression. Divided into three distinct yet interconnected parts, this thematic study analyses selected novels from across the globe, drawing on current critical debates to investigate how these narratives raise vital questions about identity, power and language. Examinations of children’s and young adult novels from Britain, Ireland, Sweden, the USA, Australia, and New Zealand offer fresh readings of established texts, and provide important critical perspectives on lesser-known works. The book also examines the use of genre in children’s and young adult literature, including crime fiction, dystopia, coming-of-age, and historical fiction. Addressing vital social justice themes in contemporary children’s and young adult novels, such as human trafficking, postcolonialism, disaster, trauma, and gender and race inequality, the book presents a critically informed analysis of these compelling literary works and their engagement with social and cultural debates.

Recently, studies of opera, of print culture, and of music in Britain in the long nineteenth century have proliferated. This essay collection explores the multiple point of interaction among these fields. Past scholarship often used print as a simple conduit for information about opera in Britain, but these essays demonstrate that print and opera existed in a more complex symbiosis. This collection embeds opera within the culture of Britain in the long nineteenth century, a culture inundated by print. The essays explore: how print culture both disseminated and shaped operatic culture; how the businesses of opera production and publishing intertwined; how performers and impresarios used print culture to cultivate their public persona; how issues of nationalism, class, and gender impacted reception in the periodical press; and how opera intertwined with literature, not only drawing source material from novels and plays, but also as a plot element in literary works or as a point of friction in literary circles. As the growth of digital humanities increases access to print sources, and as opera scholars move away from a focus on operas as isolated works, this study points the way forward to a richer understanding of the intersections between opera and print culture.

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.

This book analyses travel texts aimed at the emergent Irish middle classes in the long nineteenth century. Unlike travel writing about Ireland, Irish travel writing about foreign spaces has been under-researched. Drawing on a wide range of neglected material and focusing on selected European destinations, this study draws out the distinctive features of an Irish corpus that often subverts dominant trends in Anglo-Saxon travel writing. As it charts Irish participation in a new ‘mass’ tourism, it shows how that participation led to heated ideological debates in Victorian and Edwardian Irish print culture. Those debates culminate in James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, which is here re-read through new discursive contextualizations. This book sheds new light on middle-class culture in pre-independence Ireland, and on Ireland’s relation to Europe. The methodology used to define its Irish corpus also makes innovative contributions to the study of travel writing.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. The gothic novel in Ireland, c. 1760–1829 offers a compelling account of the development of gothic literature in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Ireland. Countering traditional scholarly views of the ‘rise’ of ‘the gothic novel’ on the one hand, and, on the other, Irish Romantic literature, this study persuasively re-integrates a body of now overlooked works into the history of the literary gothic as it emerged across Ireland, Britain, and Europe between 1760 and 1829. Its twinned quantitative and qualitative analysis of neglected Irish texts produces a new formal, generic, and ideological map of gothic literary production in this period, persuasively positioning Irish works and authors at the centre of a new critical paradigm with which to understand both Irish Romantic and gothic literary production.