| dc.description.abstract | Though it has garnered some attention from recent scholars, the field of nineteenth- century Irish literary studies remains neglected. It seems to occupy a rather nebulous space, too "foreign" to be exactly Victorian and too early to be exactly "modern." For Victorianists, the mid- to late-nineteenth century--the heyday of the triple-decker novel--was a time ruled by such writers as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and the Brontë sisters. The English novel proved the measuring stick for most literatures produced within the British Empire, and numerous Irish studies scholars do not see Ireland's literary output as quite measuring up until the appearance of the Modernist texts of the twentieth century. My dissertation moves the conversation beyond the commonplace scholarly lament of the lack of an Irish Middlemarch toward a consideration of Anglo-Irish and Irish genre fiction--Big House fiction, Gothic fiction, the national tale, and folk and fairy tales--as a vital precursor to the national literature that would become the cornerstone of the Celtic Revival. I analyze how writers such as Maria Edgeworth, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, and W. B. Yeats manipulated these existing generic forms to construct new national narratives while representing historical and cultural change. Furthermore, my project establishes clear points of connection between the fields of Victorian and Irish studies by examining how "Irishness," which is inextricably linked to rhetorics of nationalism and colonialism, is imagined, employed, and transformed in this era. | |
