Paul E H Davis and the Irish Land Question

In his challenging new book, Paul E H Davis offers an entirely new critique of how novelists in nineteenth-century Ireland had to act -both as writers and historians — in their attempts to find a solution to what became the Irish Land Question.

Callenging the widely-held nationalist view that Irish novelists of this period had little or nothing to offer, Davis slots these castaway novelists into a new, identifiable category: the agrarian novelists.

The book is divided into three parts. Part One considers novelists writing between the Union and the Famine: Maria Edgeworth, Gerald Griffin, John and Michael Banim and William Carleton. Part Two looks at how the agrarian novel 'emigrates' with reference to the novels of Charles Kickham and to the Irish novels of Anthony Trollope. Part Three considers how some agrarian novelists — specifically Thomas Moore and Bram Stoker — felt the solution lay not in the real world but in the world of fantasy.

An exceptional book on why the agrarian novelists deserve to be valued for their unique perception of Ireland in the nineteenth century.

PaulE.H. Davis