Review of The Rogue Narrative and Irish Fiction, 1660-1790 by Joe Lines

Abstract

There was a time when Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, first published in 1800, was considered the “first truly Irish novel.” Back in 1988, when the critic James Cahalan made this claim, the words “first,” “Irish,” and “novel” may all have appeared relatively stable. Since then, however, Irish literary history has undergone a complete transformation, and along with the pluralization of concepts of national identity, our understanding of what actually constitutes a novel has been complicated and nuanced almost beyond recognition. The first appearance of that troublesome entity the “Irish novel,” has been continually pushed back, and the scholarly work of uncovering and recovering fugitive material from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been enormously successful. Rolf and Magda Loeber’s A Guide to Irish Fiction, 1650– 1900 (2006) provided Irish Studies scholars with dozens of novels (and “novels”) published in Ireland and by Irish writers long before Edgeworth’s influential text, stretching back to 1651, with the appearance of Roger Boyle’s Parthenissa