In October 1641 a rebellion broke out in Ireland. Dispossessed Irish Catholics rose up against British Protestant settlers whom they held responsible for their plight. This uprising, the first significant sectarian rebellion in Irish history, gave rise to a decade of war that would culminate in the brutal re-conquest of Ireland by Oliver Cromwell. It also set in motion one of the most enduring and acrimonious debates in Irish history. Was the 1641 rebellion a justified response to dispossession and repression? Or was it an unprovoked attempt at sectarian genocide? John Gibney comprehensively examines three centuries of this debate. The struggle to establish and interpret the facts of the past was also a struggle over the present: if Protestants had been slaughtered by vicious Catholics, this provided an ideal justification for maintaining Protestant privilege. If, on the other hand, Protestant propaganda had inflated a few deaths into a vast and brutal “massacre,” this justification was groundless. Gibney shows how politicians, historians, and polemicists have represented (and misrepresented) 1641 over the centuries, making a sectarian understanding of Irish history the dominant paradigm in the consciousness of the Irish Protestant and Catholic communities alike.

The Guide to Irish Fiction has led to the identification of hundreds of unknown or forgotten Irish authors and their works, and provides thousands of summaries of novels and anthologies. Carefully documented, the book presents details of the publication of Irish fiction in Ireland, England, North America, Australia, as well as several other European countries. Written for literary scholars and students and for anyone interested in Ireland and its literature, this book also constitutes and essential tool for historians, librarians, collectors of Irish books, and antiquarian booksellers.

A complement to Historical Figures in Fiction, which covers novels published after 1940; plans are afoot to fill the inside straight with a third volume. To help readers, librarians, teachers, and literary researchers identify and use biographical fiction, Hartman lists nearly 1,000 historical figures that appear in over 1,800 novels. In the main list by historical figure, the entries include vital dates and a brief occupation or character description before citing fully each novel. The reading level of the novels is also indicated. The indexes are by author, occupation, and title. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR