Overview

Irish literary studies has long subordinated the nineteenth century to the experimental triumphs of Irish modernism, variously dismissing its achievements as too indebted to British forms to be truly Irish, too transparently rooted in Irish history and politics to be globally or universally relevant, and too aesthetically weak to be worth close formal analysis. Race, Violence, and Form: Reframing Nineteenth-Century Ireland challenges these critical orthodoxies, employing new methodological frameworks that expand how we understand the global, racial, formal, periodized, and political scope of nineteenth-century Irish literature. The essays in the collection move fluidly between history and form, archive and imagination, past and present, and Ireland and elsewhere as they re-examine the genres of nineteenth-century Ireland, coin new aesthetic categories, and theorize Ireland’s mobile place in world networks. Focusing as much on how literary criticism has marginalized and delimited nineteenth-century Irish literature as on the new, more expansive literary and cultural histories that this literature catalyzes, the collection argues that the project of re-reading nineteenth-century Ireland challenges accepted methodologies, imperial hierarchies, and narratives of exceptionalism whose reach extends far beyond Ireland itself. Race, Violence, and Form thus not only offers exciting new directions for Irish studies scholarship, but also models an approach to nineteenth-century literary studies that de-emphasizes insularity in favor of global, collaborative, and open-ended imagining.

Full Product Details

Author:   Renée Fox ,  Mary L. Mullen
Publisher:   Liverpool University Press
Imprint:   Liverpool University Press
ISBN:  

9781836240310

ISBN 10:   1836240317
Pages:   272
Publication Date:   28 March 2026
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Table of Contents

Introduction, Race, Violence, and Form: Reframing Nineteenth-Century Ireland Renée Fox and Mary L. Mullen Race and the Myth of Whiteness 1. Wilde in America: Race and the (Non-) Referent of Ireland Patrick R. O’Malley 2. Moving into Chicago’s ‘White City’: Race, Medievalism and White Irishness at the 1893 World’s Fair Amy C. Mulligan National Violence 3. Shifting Realism: Maria Edgeworth, Novels, and the Irish Bull Yoon Sun Lee 4. Thomas Moore’s Riotous History: The Unbearable Humor of the Memoirs of Captain Rock Katarzyna Bartoszyńska 5. Reproduction, Maternal Mortality, and the National Tale Matthew Reznicek Colonial Intersections and Circulations 6. Irish Gothic and Global Reading Cultures in the Long Nineteenth Century Christina Morin 7. Rocks and Referentiality: Ireland, Palestine, and Emily Lawless’s Novels Mary L. Mullen 8. Oscar Wilde, Classical Greece, and Home Rule Simon Joyce Violent Forms 9. 'A System of Terror': Ireland, the Gothic Mode, and Marx's Critique of Colonial Capitalism Amy E. Martin 10. The Abuses of Nineteenth-Century Genre: Irish Historical Fiction, Then and Now Renée Fox Responses Race, Violence, Form—and Care Talia Schaffer Irish Agents Ian Duncan Afterword: Irish Racial Ambivalence and White Supremacy in the Colonial Caribbean Alisha R. Walters

Reviews

'This collection exemplifies the combination of consistency across the whole with range and diversity of approach and materials. It demonstrates how dislodging the Irish novel (and Irish culture and history) from the comparative frame that has been dominated by its relation to English examples proves to be highly productive of new understandings of the genre and of its specifically Irish version’s capacity to circulate and find reception in a global context. Accordingly, it should make a highly valued contribution to the field and represent one of those collections that becomes a touchstone for future critical thinking.' David Lloyd, Distinguished Professor of English, University of California, Riverside

Author Information

Renée Fox is Associate Professor of Literature and Jordan-Stern Presidential Chair for Dickens and Nineteenth-Century Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Mary L. Mullen is Associate Professor of English at Villanova University.

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