James H. Murphy – författare

The Oxford History of the Irish Book is a major new series that charts one of the most venerable book cultures in Europe, from the earliest manuscript compilations to the flourishing book industries of the late twentieth century. For the first time, it offers a history of the Irish book as a created object situated in a world of communications, trade, transport, power, and money, and examines the ways in which books have both reflected and influenced social, political, and intellectual formations in Ireland. It is an important project for the understanding of Ireland's written and printed heritage, and is by its nature of profound cross-cultural significance, embracing as it does all the written and printed traditions and heritages of Ireland and placing them in the global context of a worldwide interest in book histories. Volume IV: The Irish Book in English 1800-1891 details the story of the book in Ireland from the Act of Union, which ended Ireland's lucrative exemption from British copyright, to the Irish revival, with its emphasis on cultural nationalism. Though retaining its own identity during this period the Irish publishing industry also participated in a wider British publishing culture, less perhaps the result of political change than the result of the industrialization of production. The chapters in this volume deal with book production and distribution and the differing of ways in which publishing existed in Dublin, Belfast, and the provinces. The nineteenth century saw a dramatic rise in literacy rates in Ireland, the advent of national education, and the development of new opportunities and spaces for reading that eclipsed previous communal reading practices. Religious publishing was a major enterprise not only because of the rise in devotionalism but also because of the religious controversies that raged in the early part of the century. Literary genres engaged both Irish and British audiences with Irish issues, though they found a publishing outlet largely through London publishers. Scholarly societies of both the antiquarian and scientific varieties sustained a relatively high degree of local publishing, mostly through journals. Medical and musical publishing appeared for quite a while to defy the centralizing pull of British publishing. In spite of the challenges of the times, writers, publishers, readers, and institutions often responded with energy and creativity to a world of extraordinary change. It was a world of considerable diversity and great fascination. Relying on a high degree of original research, both archival and bibliographical, this volume treats both general trends and individual stories.

This is the first comprehensive study of the Irish writers of the Victorian age, some of them still remembered, most of them now forgotten. Their work was often directed to a British as well as an Irish reading audience and was therefore disparaged in the era of W.B. Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival with its culturally nationalist agenda. This study is based on a reading of around 370 novels by 150 authors, including still-familiar novelists such as William Carleton, the peasant writer who wielded much influence, and Charles Lever, whose serious work was destroyed by the slur of 'rollicking', as well as Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, George Moore, Emily Lawless, Somerville and Ross, Bram Stoker, and three of the leading authors from the new-woman movement, Sarah Grand, Iota, and George Egerton. James H. Murphy examines the work of these and many other writers in a variety of contexts: the political, economic, and cultural developments of the time; the vicissitudes of the reading audience; the realities of a publishing industry that was for the most part London-based; the often difficult circumstances of the lives of the novelists; and the ever changing genre of the novel itself, to which Irish authors often made a contribution. Politics, history, religion, gender and, particularly, land, over which nineteenth-century Ireland was deeply divided, featured as key themes for fiction. Finally, the book engages with the critical debate of recent times concerning the supposed failure of realism in the nineteenth-century Irish novel, looking for more specific causes than have hitherto been offered and discovering occasions on which realism turned out to be possible.

The eruption of rural distress in Ireland and the foundation of the Land League in 1879 sparked a number of novels, stories and plays forming an immediate response to what became known as the Irish Land war. These works form a literary genre of their own and illuminate both the historical events themselves and the material conditions of reading and writing in late nineteenth-century Ireland. Divisions into ‘us’ and ‘them’ were convenient for political reasons, but the fiction of the period frequently modifies this alignment and draws attention to the complexity of the land problem. This collection includes studies of canonical land war novels, publication channels, collaborations between artists and authors, literary conventions and the interplay between personal experience and literary output. It also includes unique resources such as a reprinted letter by the author Mary Anne Sadlier and a reproduction of Rosa Mulholland’s little-known play Our Boycotting. The book concludes with a detailed bibliography of land war fiction between 1879 and 1916, which should inspire further reading and research into the genre.