The Irish novel in the nineteenth century

Facts and fictions

Jacqueline Belanger, editor

'The collection of essays which comprise The Irish Novel more than satisfy this desired "critical responsiveness", and encouragingly imply that current studies of the nineteenth-century Irish novel are pointing the way forward to stimulating and original critical possibilities by very precisely "address[ing] this view of the Irish novel in English, reconsidering definitions of the Irish novel in the period 1800–1900, and interrogating current critical discourse surrounding nineteenth-century Irish fiction". The essays arise from a conference held at the University of Cardiff in September 2001, and despite what seems to have been an overly long gestation period, the resulting publication has definitely been worth the wait. An exuberant list of principal scholars in the field of nineteenth-century Irish literary and cultural studies makes up the collection’s authors, from Joep Leerssen, Margaret Kelleher, and Norman Vance, to Jo Cleary, Emer Nolan, and Claire Connolly', Anne Jamison, Irish Studies Review.