Title: The Anglo-Irish novel and the big house
First published: 1998
Description: Irish fiction, Vera Kreilkamp argues, needs to be rescued from the critical assumptions underlying attacks on the historical mythologies of Yeats and the Literary Revival. Exploring a uniquely Irish version of colonial and postcolonial literature, she charts the self-critical formulations of a gentry society facing its extinction - more often and more successfully with comic irony than with nostalgia.

The result is a comprehensive study of the ascendancy novel from Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) through contemporary reinventions of the form.

Her attention to Edgeworth's Irish works, the fiction of the neglected Victorian novelist Charles Lever, and the gothic forms of the Big House novel by Sheridan Le Fanu and Charles Maturin provide a historical context for later reformulations of the genre by Somerville and Ross, Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane, William Trevor, Jennifer Johnston, Aidan Higgins, and John Banville.
Subjects: History, History and criticism, Landowners in literature, Literature and society, Dwellings in literature, Upper class in literature, Country homes in literature, British in literature, English fiction, Land tenure in literature, Irish authors, Gentry in literature, English literature, irish authors, history and criticism, Social classes in literature, English fiction, irish authors, history and criticism
Places: Ireland
LC classification: PR8807.C68 K74 1998