Exploring the effects of traveling, migration, and other forms of cultural contact, particularly within Europe, this edited collection explores the act of traveling and the representation of traveling by Irish men and women from diverse walks of life in the period between Grattan’s Parliament (1782) and World War I (1914). This was a period marked by an increasing physical and cultural mobility of Irish throughout Britain, Continental Europe, the Americas, and the Pacific. Travel was undertaken for a variety of reasons: during the Romantic period, the ‘Grand Tour’ and what is now sometimes referred to as medical tourism brought Irish artists and intellectuals to Europe, where cultural exchanges with other writers, artists, and thinkers inspired them to introduce novel ideas and cultural forms to their Irish audiences. Showing this impact of the nineteenth-century Irish across national borders and their engagement with global cultural and linguistic traditions, the volume will provide novel insights into the transcultural spheres of the arts, literature, politics, and translation in which they were active.

Mobility was central to imperialism, from the human movements entailed in exploration, travel and migration to the information, communications and commodity flows vital to trade, science, governance and military power. While historians have written on exploration, commerce, imperial transport and communications networks, and the movements of slaves, soldiers and scientists, few have reflected upon the social, cultural, economic and political significance of mobile practices, subjects and infrastructures that underpin imperial networks, or examined the qualities of movement valued by imperial powers and agents at different times. This collection explores the intersection of debates on imperial relations, colonialism and empire with emerging work on mobility. In doing this, it traces how the movements of people, representations and commodities helped to constitute the British empire from the late-eighteenth century through to the Second World War.

Figures from the Scots-Irish Andrew Jackson to the Caribbean-Irish Rihanna, as well as literature, film, caricature, and beauty discourse, convey how the Irish racially transformed multiple times: in the slave-holding Caribbean, on America's frontiers and antebellum plantations, and along its eastern seaboard. This cultural history of race and centuries of Irishness in the Americas examines the forcibly transported Irish, the eighteenth-century Presbyterian Ulster-Scots, and post-1845 Famine immigrants. Their racial transformations are indicated by the designations they acquired in the Americas: 'Redlegs,' 'Scots-Irish,' and 'black Irish.' In literature by Fitzgerald, O'Neill, Mitchell, Glasgow, and Yerby (an African-American author of Scots-Irish heritage), the Irish are both colluders and victims within America's racial structure. Depictions range from Irish encounters with Native and African Americans to competition within America's immigrant hierarchy between 'Saxon' Scots-Irish and 'Celtic' Irish Catholic. Irish-connected presidents feature, but attention to queer and multiracial authors, public women, beauty professionals, and performers complicates the 'Irish whitening' narrative. Thus, 'Irish Princess' Grace Kelly's globally-broadcast ascent to royalty paves the way for 'America's royals,' the Kennedys. The presidencies of the Scots-Irish Jackson and Catholic-Irish Kennedy signalled their respective cohorts' assimilation. Since Gothic literature particularly expresses the complicity that attaining power ('whiteness') entails, subgenres named 'Scots-Irish Gothic' and 'Kennedy Gothic' are identified: in Gothic by Brown, Poe, James, Faulkner, and Welty, the violence of the colonial Irish motherland is visited upon marginalized Americans, including, sometimes, other Irish groupings. History is Gothic in Irish-American narrative because the undead Irish past replays within America's contexts of race.

This collection is the first of its kind to interrogate both literal and metaphorical transatlantic exchanges of culture and ideas in nineteenth-century girls’ fiction. As such, it initiates conversations about how the motif of travel in literature taught nineteenth-century girl audiences to reexamine their own cultural biases by offering a fresh perspective on literature that is often studied primarily within a national context. Women and children in nineteenth-century America are often described as being tied to the home and the domestic sphere, but this collection challenges this categorization and shows that girls in particular were often expected to go abroad and to learn new cultural frames in order to enter the realm of adulthood; those who could not afford to go abroad literally could do so through the stories that traveled to them from other lands or the stories they read of others’ travels. Via transatlantic exchange, then, authors, readers, and the characters in the texts covered in this collection confront the idea of what constitutes the self. Books examined in this volume include Adeline Trafton’s An American Girl Abroad (1872), Johanna Spyri’s Heidi (1881), and Elizabeth W. Champney’s eleven-book Vassar Girl Series (1883-92), among others.

Travelling Ideas in the Long Nineteenth Century is about how ideas travel on the waves of cultural transfer. The volume focuses in particular on the exchange of ideas, knowledge and culture between the Nordic countries and continental Europe. It includes reflections on travelling and transmitting ideas through various forms, and takes a step further in scrutinising how new theories in literary, cultural and historical studies, as well as new methods, are influencing research in the field of cultural transfer and transmission. In the first part of the volume, the authors examine the export and import of ideas through literature in translation, travel letters, international education strategies and the establishment of artists' colonies. Attention is paid to how writers, artists and cultural transmitters used their cross-border mobility in transferring ideas and how they were connected to each other in new contact zones. The second part is dedicated to new research approaches, such as the use of digital instruments, and research on the strategies and politics behind translated literature. Here, translation bibliographies and the bibliographical data of national libraries, which today are often accessible in digital form, come under scrutiny. These sources are valuable objects of study in the mining of translation flows.

This book analyses travel texts aimed at the emergent Irish middle classes in the long nineteenth century. Unlike travel writing about Ireland, Irish travel writing about foreign spaces has been under-researched. Drawing on a wide range of neglected material and focusing on selected European destinations, this study draws out the distinctive features of an Irish corpus that often subverts dominant trends in Anglo-Saxon travel writing. As it charts Irish participation in a new ‘mass’ tourism, it shows how that participation led to heated ideological debates in Victorian and Edwardian Irish print culture. Those debates culminate in James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, which is here re-read through new discursive contextualizations. This book sheds new light on middle-class culture in pre-independence Ireland, and on Ireland’s relation to Europe. The methodology used to define its Irish corpus also makes innovative contributions to the study of travel writing.

"This book offers new insights on the integration of Irish diasporic communities into the fledgling democracies of Australia, Canada, and the United States to which they offered a significant ideological contribution as they engaged with key debates about nationalism, democracy, citizenship, and minority rights"--