Irish literary studies has long subordinated the nineteenth century to the experimental triumphs of Irish modernism, variously dismissing its achievements as too indebted to British forms to be truly Irish, too transparently rooted in Irish history and politics to be globally or universally relevant, and too aesthetically weak to be worth close formal analysis. Race, Violence, and Form: Reframing Nineteenth-Century Ireland challenges these critical orthodoxies, employing new methodological frameworks that expand how we understand the global, racial, formal, periodized, and political scope of nineteenth-century Irish literature. The essays in the collection move fluidly between history and form, archive and imagination, past and present, and Ireland and elsewhere as they re-examine the genres of nineteenth-century Ireland, coin new aesthetic categories, and theorize Ireland’s mobile place in world networks. Focusing as much on how literary criticism has marginalized and delimited nineteenth-century Irish literature as on the new, more expansive literary and cultural histories that this literature catalyzes, the collection argues that the project of re-reading nineteenth-century Ireland challenges accepted methodologies, imperial hierarchies, and narratives of exceptionalism whose reach extends far beyond Ireland itself. Race, Violence, and Form thus not only offers exciting new directions for Irish studies scholarship, but also models an approach to nineteenth-century literary studies that de-emphasizes insularity in favor of global, collaborative, and open-ended imagining.
