This book re-reads the tangled relations of book culture and literary culture in the early nineteenth century by restoring to view the figure of the bookman and the effaced history of his book clubs.
Ina Ferris examines the way in which the problem of 'incomplete union' generated by the formation of the United Kingdom in 1800 destabilised British public discourse in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Ferris offers the first full-length study of the chief genre to emerge out of the political problem of Union: the national tale, an intercultural and mostly female-authored fictional mode that articulated Irish grievances to English readers. Ferris draws on current theory and archival research to show how the national tale crucially intersected with other public genres such as travel narratives, critical reviews and political discourse. In this fascinating study, Ferris shows how the national tales of Morgan, Edgeworth, Maturin, and the Banim brothers dislodged key British assumptions and foundational narratives of history, family and gender in the period.
"This ground-breaking collection of essays presents a new bookish literary history, which situates questions about books at the intersection of a range of debates about the role of authors and readers
Charlotte Turner Smith held a central position during the formative years of the British Romantic period. Smith's work includes eleven novels and two fictional adaptations from the French. This editio
