Table of Contents

1: Introduction: Approaches to Reading Irish Fiction
2: The Fashionable Potato: Lady Blessington and W.H. Maxwell
3: Peasant or Pheasant novelist? The Authority of William Carleton
4: Ruin through Rollicking: Poor Charles Lever
5: Sensational Stalwarts: Irish Victorian Novelists in Mid Century
6: 'Two Nations on One Soil': Land, Fenians, and Politics in Fiction
7: 'Real Protestantism never Slumbers': Religious and Historical Fiction
8: Frenzied Form: The Land-War Novel
9: Grania and her Sisters: New Women Abroad and at Home
10: Fin de Siècle: Vortex of the Genres
11: The Lives of the Irish Novelists
12: Conclusion: Contested Representations
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

James H. Murphy is Professor of English and was also for a time Director of Irish Studies at DePaul University, Chicago, having previously taught in Ireland. He specialises in nineteenth-century Ireland, focusing particularly on the history of the novel and on the political history of the period. He is the author or (co-) editor of ten previous books, including (as author) Abject Loyalty: Nationalism and Monarchy in Ireland, during the Reign of Queen Victoria,
Ireland, a Social, Cultural and Literary History, 1791-1891, and Catholic Fiction and Social Reality in Ireland, 1873-1922. He has twice been president of the Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century
Ireland.

Reviews

an excellent addition to the study of Irish fiction ... opens up a myriad new perspectives on Irish popular fiction.
*Christopher Cusack, English Studies*

Unique in its comprehensive approach [this book] fills a prominent gap in the field of Irish literary studies. The comprehensive study is one of the first of its kind, and one can only hope that additional scholars will follow suit
*R. M. Lee, Irish Studies Review*