This book analyzes the role of Irishness in nineteenth-century constructions of race and racialization, both in the British Isles and in the United States. Focusing on the years immediately preceding the American Civil War, Patrick O’Malley interrogates the bardic verse epic, the gothic tale, the realist novel, the stage melodrama, and the political polemic to ask how many mid-nineteenth-century Irish nationalist writers with liberationist politics declined to oppose race-based chattel enslavement in the United States and the structures of white supremacy that underpinned and ultimately outlived it. Many of the writers whose work O’Malley examines drew specifically upon the image of Black suffering to generate support for their arguments for Irish political enfranchisement; yet in doing so, they frequently misrepresented the fundamental differences between Irish and Black experience under the regimes of white supremacy, which has had profound consequences.

In addition to her readings of a fascinating array of works---The Picture of Dorian Gray, Heart of Darkness --

This book asks how English authors of the early to mid twentieth-century responded to the nationalist revolution in neighbouring Ireland in their work, and explores this response as an expression of anxieties about, and aspirations within, England itself. Drawing predominantly on novels of this period, but also on letters, travelogues, literary criticism, and memoir, it illustrates how Irish affairs provided a marginal but pervasive point of reference for a wide range of canonical authors in England, including Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh, and also for many lesser-known figures such as Ethel Mannin, George Thomson, and T.H. White. The book surveys these and other incidental writers within the broad framework of literary modernism, an arc seen to run in temporal parallel to Ireland's revolutionary trajectory from rebellion to independence. In this context, it addresses two distinct aspects of the Irish-English relationship as it features in the literature of the time: first, the uneasy recognition of a fundamental similarity between the two countries in terms of their potential for violent revolutionary instability, and second, the proleptic engagement of Irish events to prefigure, imaginatively, the potential course of England's evolution from the Armistice to the Second World War. Tracing these effects, this book offers a topical renegotiation of the connections between Irish and English literary culture, nationalism, and political ideology, together with a new perspective on the Irish sources engaged by English literary modernism.

This book examines the ways in which imperial agendas informed the writing of history in nineteenth-century Britain and how historical writing transformed imperial agendas. Using the published writings and personal papers of Walter Scott, J. A. Froude, James Mill, Rammohun Roy, T. B. Macaulay, E. A. Freeman, W. E. Gladstone, and J. R. Seeley among others, Theodore Koditschek sheds light on the role of the historical imagination in the establishment and legitimation of liberal imperialism. He shows how both imperialists and the imperialized were drawn to reflect back on the Empire's past as a result of the need to construct a modern, multi-national British imperial identity for a more economically expansive and enlightened present. By tracing the imperial lives and historical works of these pivotal figures, Theodore Koditschek illuminates the ways in which discourse altered practice, and vice versa, as well as how the history of Empire was continuously written and re-written.

This book reconstitutes the category of 'space' as a crucial element within contemporary cultural, literary and historical studies in Ireland. The study is based on the dual premise of an explosion of interest in the category of space in modern cultural criticism and social inquiry, and the consolidation of Irish studies as a significant scholarly field across a number of institutional and intellectual contexts. Besides a methodological/theoretical introduction and extended case studies, the book includes an auto-critical dimension which extends its interest into the fields of local history and life-writing.

A disturbing but ultimately discredited strain in American thought, eugenics was a crucial ideological force in the early twentieth century. Luczak investigates the work of writers like Jack London and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, to consider the impact of eugenic racial discourse on American literary production from 1900-1940.

Reveals how in the culturally volatile 1930s the symphony, long associated with ideas of selfhood, was a flourishing transnational phenomenon.

Dickens's Idiomatic Imagination offers an original analysis of how Charles Dickens's use of "low" and "slangular" (his neologism) language allowed him to express and develop his most sophisticated ideas. Using a hybrid of digital (distant) and analogue (close) reading methodologies, Peter J. Capuano considers Dickens's use of bodily idioms—"right-hand man," "shoulder to the wheel," "nose to the grindstone"—against the broader lexical backdrop of the nineteenth century. Dickens was famously drawn to the vernacular language of London's streets, but this book is the first to call attention to how he employed phrases that embody actions, ideas, and social relations for specific narrative and thematic purposes. Focusing on the mid- to late career novels Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, Capuano demonstrates how Dickens came to relish using common idioms in uncommon ways and the possibilities they opened up for artistic expression. Dickens's Idiomatic Imagination establishes a unique framework within the social history of language alteration in nineteenth-century Britain for rethinking Dickens's literary trajectory and its impact on the vocabularies of generations of novelists, critics, and speakers of English.

A critical study of Edward Wilmot Blyden, whose voluminous writings laid the groundwork for some of the most important African and black diasporic thinkers of the twentieth century.

The nineteenth century laid the foundations of history, both professional and popular. The authors of this collection compare Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium, unearthing the ways in which history was conceived and then utilized, usually for nationalistic purposes.