[Download] "Rolf Loeber and Magda Loeber with Anne Mullin Burnham, A Guide to Irish Fiction, 1650-1900 (Book Review)" by Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Rolf Loeber and Magda Loeber with Anne Mullin Burnham, A Guide to Irish Fiction, 1650-1900 (Book Review)
- Author : Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies
- Release Date : January 22, 2007
- Genre: Reference,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 347 KB
Description
Rolf Loeber and Magda Loeber with Anne Mullin Burnham, A Guide to Irish Fiction, 1650-1900. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006. cxv + 1489 pages. EUR 90.00 (hardback). With her novel Castle Rackrent Maria Edgeworth, in a startlingly modernist move, initiated her own tradition: consciously ignoring all that had gone before her and, in doing so, staking a claim for the utter originality and innovation of her own work. Surprisingly for many years the majority of literary critics, with very few exceptions, took Edgeworth at her word and constructed a very narrow Irish novelistic canon from 1800 onwards. This situation had been compounded by the fact that prose fiction and the novel in particular continued, and indeed continues, to inhabit a peculiar peripheral position in Irish literature when compared to that of drama and poetry. One reason for this belief is the outstanding transformative success of the literary and cultural revivalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century who especially celebrated the possibilities of Gaelic poetry, as well as the immediacy of impact offered by the theatre. The novel being the vulgar form of modernity, perhaps, seemed too wedded to popular concerns and sentiment, thus running counter to the hoped for presentation of elevated and serious Irish character and emotion beyond the merely comic and stereotypical.