This Companion provides an authoritative introduction to the historical, social and stylistic complexities of modern Irish culture. It introduces Irish culture in its broadest sense and guides the reader through the cultural and theoretical debates that inform our understanding of modern Ireland. The range of topics covered by the contributors demonstrates a comprehensive understanding of Irish culture and the development of modern Ireland.

This novel intervenes in many of the literary and philosophical debates of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, forging a connection between the eighteenth-century discourse of sentiment and the emergent nineteenth-century concept of the nation. Lady Morgan's Introductory Letters are included.

Claire Connolly offers a cultural history of the Irish novel in the period between the radical decade of the 1790s and the gaining of Catholic Emancipation in 1829. These decades saw the emergence of a group of talented Irish writers who developed and advanced such innovative forms as the national tale and the historical novel: fictions that took Ireland as their topic and setting and which often imagined its history via domestic plots that addressed wider issues of dispossession and inheritance. Their openness to contemporary politics, as well as to recent historiography, antiquarian...