Tracing the history of the Catholic-authored novel in nineteenth-century Ireland, from its origins during the Catholic political resurgence of the 1820s to its transformation by James Joyce's Ulysses in 1922, Emer Nolan offers a unique tour of Ireland's literary landscape. Exploring a literary line too often overlooked in favor of Irish Gothic, she challenges received histories of nineteenth-century Irish fiction, and shows how an emergent and sometimes combative Catholic middle class generated its own idiosyncratic narrative forms.
She offers a major reassessment of such figures as Thomas Moore, George Moore, and Charles Kickham and of sentimental fiction in nineteenth-century Ireland. With keen insight and deft arguments, Nolan presents a highly original exploration of James Joyce and his relationship to his nineteenth-century Irish Catholic predecessors. At once provocative and enlightening, Catholic Emancipations is an invaluable addition to the fields of Irish studies, Joyce studies, and the nineteenth-century novel.
