Ireland and the Fiction of Improvement
Ireland and the Fiction of Improvement
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Abstract
This book studies Irish improvement fiction, a neglected genre of 19th-century literary, social, and political history. The book shows how the fiction of Mary Leadbeater, Charles Bardin, Martin Doyle, and William Carleton attempted to lure Irish peasants and landowners away from popular genres such as fantasy, romance, and ‘radical’ political tracts as well as ‘high’ literary and philosophical forms of enquiry. These writers attempted to cultivate a taste for the didactic tract, an assertively realist mode of representation. Accordingly, improvement fiction laboured to demonstrate the value of hard work, frugality, and sobriety in a rigorously realistic idiom, representing the contentment that inheres in a plain social order free of excess and embellishment. Improvement discourse defined itself in opposition to the perceived extremism of revolutionary politics and literary writing, seeking (but failing) to exemplify how both political discontent and unhappiness could be offset by a strict practicality and prosaic realism. This book demonstrates how improvement reveals itself to be a literary discourse, enmeshed in the very rhetorical abyss it sought to escape. In addition, the proudly liberal rhetoric of improvement is shown to be at one with the imperial discourse it worked to displace. The book argues that improvement discourse is embedded in the literary and cultural mainstream of modern Ireland and has hindered the development of intellectual and political debate throughout this period. These issues are examined in chapters exploring the career of William Carleton; peasant ‘orality’; educational provision in the post-Union period; the Irish language; secret society violence; Young Ireland nationalism; and the Irish Revival.
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Front Matter
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Introduction: The Aesthetics of Plainness
Helen O’connell
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1
‘False Refinement’, Plain Speech and Improved Writing
Helen O’connell
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2
Improvement and Nostalgia: Society Schools and Hedge Schools
Helen O’connell
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3
The Silence of Irish
Helen O’connell
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4
Political Discipline and the Rhetoric of Moderation
Helen O’connell
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5
The Aesthetics of Excess: Improvement and Revivalism
Helen O’connell
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Conclusion
Helen O’connell
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End Matter
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