A guide to Irish fiction, 1650–1900

Rolf Loeber & Magda Loeber, with Anne M. Burnham

‘This guide will be an indispensable resource for generations of scholars and students … An astonishing scholarly achievement … Essential', J.G. Matthews, Choice.

'[An] awe-inspiring, survey of Irish fiction … It must be said emphatically that A Guide to Irish Fiction is the most important work of Irish scholarship to have been published in two generations. It is magisterial in both its conception and its achievement. This labour of love will transform the very nature of the way we see Irish life as reflected in Irish fiction … ', Peter Costello, Irish Catholic.

'The story contained in the Loeber’s hefty but helpfully organised volume is of such complexity that it will continue to work on its readers far into the future. Others may rearrange the new and recondite information in different patterns. Yet the Guide is set to become the text on which subsequent studies of written and printed fictions in Ireland will inevitably, and gratefully, be based', Toby Barnard, Times Literary Supplement.

'One of the chief short-term effects of this bibliography on the reader is amazement, an amazement at the scale of one’s own ignorance and at the scale of the Loebers' achievement. Here we have opened to us a vast new territory which comes to us freighted with such detail – names and titles, dates, plot summaries, sources, locations – that the discovery and mapping of it is instantly recognisable as a great scholarly achievement. What we have here is a new research tool, the creation of which has completely altered the configuration of what has been up to now blithely called 'Irish Fiction'. That term, we can now see, was itself a fiction; here is the reality of what we should have known and now, thanks to the Loebers, we can finally know', Seamus Deane.

'Few works aspire so completely to remap the territory they explore as the volume under review; still fewer succeed. This long awaited Guide, however, will transform the study of pre-twentieth-century Irish fiction both in ways the authors hope and in others less immediately predictable. Although generous acknowledgement is accorded to the compilers of previous bibliographies, the Guide marks so great an advance on such efforts as to render comparison of limited value', Ian Campbell Ross, Eighteenth-Century Ireland (2007).