Description:
The late 19th and early 20th century was a key period of cultural transition in Ireland. Fiction was used in a plainly partisan or polemical fashion to advance changes in Irish society. Murphy explores the outlook of certain important social classes during this time frame through an assessment of Irish Catholic fiction. This highly original study provides a new context for understanding the works of canonical authors such as Joyce and George Moore by discussing them in light of the now almost forgotten writing from which they emerged--the several hundred novels that were written during the period, many of them by women writers.
Review Quotes: "The study of modern Irish literature written in English has long emphasized its Anglo-Irish and Protestant traditions, James Joyce's critique of Catholicism only further solidifying the notion that Irish artists mostly sought distance from the Church of Rome. Murphy provides a useful reminder of the large number of writers in the late-19th and early-20th centuries whose fiction advanced and advocated the social experience of Irish Catholics...[H]is introduction to and tabulation of these works highlights a badly neglected area in Irish studies."-Choice