Recently there has been a growing scholarly interest in Sydney, Lady Morgan (nee Sydney Owenson). The reasons are many. In this work Dr.Donovan contextualizes an important yet relatively neglected author by analyzing an emblematic Irishness that was too often dismissed in the early 19th century as excessive showmanship; the criticism was not without some basis since Owenson was an actor's daughter and grew up in the company of traveling performers. The study includes an extensive discussion of Morgan's personal papers and artifacts housed in the national Library of Ireland and the Royal Irish Academy. No previous study has fully considered this crucial archival material and its implications. In addition unpublished and hitherto unconsulted papers from the Yale University collection are also part of this original research monograph. Owenson's writing is far ranging (she is known both as a polemicist and the author of works on post restoration Italy as well as Ireland) and she commanded the friendship and respect of many early 19th c authors and poets including Byron, Shelley, Moore among many others. The table of contents includes: Introduction Body, Text and Textile in "The Wild Irish Girl" Sydney Owenson's Self-Fashioning How Sydney Owenson Played the Harp Ireland in Europe and the World: Sydney Owenson's Travel Writing Owenson in the 19th Century Irish Research Series, No.55

The eighteenth-century salon played an important role in shaping literary culture, while both creating and sustaining transnational intellectual networks. Focusing on archival materials, this book is the first detailed examination of the literary salon in Ireland, considered in the wider contexts of contemporary salon culture in Britain and France.

Once regarded as Ireland’s national bard, Thomas Moore's reputation rests on the ten immensely popular collections of drawing-room songs known as the Irish Melodies. At home and abroad, these 124 songs created a realm of influence that continued to define Irish culture throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. In this book, Una Hunt provides the first detailed assessment from a combined musical and literary standpoint, contextualizing the songs through an examination of their ‘sources’ and ‘style’. Further attention is given to the collaborative work of composers Sir John Stevenson and Henry Rowley Bishop and the study is completed by a reappraisal of the musical sources.

A self-described “disappointed Author”, Charles Robert Maturin (1780-1824) has been largely relegated to the margins of literary history since his death in 1824. Yet, as this study demonstrates, he exerted a fundamental influence on the development of Irish fiction in the early nineteenth century. In particular, his novels dramatically underscore the continuing presence and deployment of the Gothic mode in Romantic Ireland – an influence now frequently overlooked in critical attention to the national and regional forms popularized in Ireland in the wake of Anglo-Irish Union (1801). Working from Jacques Derrida’s influential theory on ghosts, this study positions Maturin as the cornerstone on which to build a new paradigm of Irish Romantic fiction, one which accounts for the spectral traces of the past – cultural, social, and political – evident in early-nineteenth century Irish fiction. As it does so, it calls for renewed critical and popular attention to an author who himself continues spectrally to emerge in the works of his literary successors.