New article

Later this month, Peter Lang will publish The Great Irish Famine and Social Class, edited by Marguérite Corporaal and Peter Gray. The collection, a product of the International Network of Irish Famine Studies, features my essay “Transformative Nationalism and Class Relations in Irish Famine Fiction, 1896-1909.” In my chapter, I look at how Young Irelander nationalism is used as a strategy to validate the hegemony of the upper classes in a number of novels about the Irish Famine, including Louise Field’s Denis (1896) and L.T. Meade’s The Stormy Petrel (1909).

As I argue in my essay, these novels “do not present the landlord class as a whole as parasitical and alien, as nationalists such as Michael Davitt and James Connolly did, but attempt to humanize and hibernicize the class, by incorporating them into the narrative of Famine victimhood, emphasizing their self-sacrificing efforts on behalf of the poor, and scripting them into the nationalist story of (intermittently) emergent nationhood.”