The Big House Of Inver

This novel, according to Somerville, "concerns the history of one of those minor dynasties that, in Ireland, have risen, and rules, and rioted, and crashed in ruins." "Somerville and Ross know their world as well as Jane Austen knew hers."—John Bayley.

The Big House has been an element of tragedy in the course of Ireland's history and it is considered such by contemporary novelists such as Aidan Higgins and Jennifer Johnson. It has been the crucible in which two civilizations failed to melt and yet became inseparably bound together."ófrom the Introduction by Guy Fehlmann. Contents: Introduction An Historical Survey, Guy Fehlmann; The Big House in Western Ireland, Breand·n MacAodha; "Cast a Cold Eye": A Sociological Approach, Joy Rudd; Distribution, Function and Architecture, Breand·n MacAodha; The Beginnings of Big House Fiction; Maria Edgeworth: Castle Rackrent, Bernard Legros; Irish Homes in the Work of C.R. Maturin, Claude FiÈrobe; Historical Glimpses: John Banim, Bernard Escarbelt; Gerald Griffin, Michel Flot; Le Fanu's Houses, Jean Lozes; The Golden Age; George Moore's Big House Novel: A Drama in Muslin, Jean NoÎl; Joyce Cary: Castle Corner, A Big House Novel?, Jacques Emprin; Interior and Exterior: The Big House and the Irish Landscape in the Work of Elizabeth Bowen, GearÛid Cronin; Elizabeth Bowen's A World of Love, Josette Leray; The Big House in Se·n O'Faol·in's Fiction, Denis Sampson; Molly Keane, Maurice Elliot; Jennifer Johnston, Mark Mortimer; John Banville and the Subversion of the Big House Novel, GearÛid Cronin; A View from Outside; A Shadowless Castle of Treasures: Kinalty Castle in Henry Green's Loving, Fiona MacPhail; Major and Majestic: J.G. Farrell's Troubles, Fiona MacPhail; Through the Poets' Eyes; Yeats and the Big Houses, Jacqueline Genet; The "Big House" by Paul Muldoon: The Approach of the Satirist, Dominique Gauthier; The Image of the Big House in the Poetry of Derek Mahon and Tom Paulin, Caroline MacDonough.

This book is a comprehensive study of the ascendancy novel from Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (I800) through contemporary reinventions of the form. Kreilkamp argues that Irish fiction needs to be rescued from the critical assumptions underlying attacks on the historical mythologies of Yeats and the Literary Revival. Exploring the uniquely Irish dimensions of colonial and post-colonial societies, Kreilkamp charts the self-critical formulations of a gentry culture facing its extinction—more often and more successfully with comic irony than nostalgia. Kreilkamp positions the Big House novels within current debates in postcolonial criticism and theory. She argues that these fictional representations of a beleaguered society provide a complex, nuanced gaze into a hybrid colonial group that distanced itself from the self-aggrandizements of the revivalists. As she examines the gothic, revisionist, and postmodern permutations of an enduring national form, she illustrates the ways ascendancy women transformed conventions of an English domestic genre into political fiction. Her attention to Edgeworth's Irish works, the fiction of the neglected Victorian novelist Charles Lever, and the gothic forms of the Big House by Sheridan Le Fanu and Charles Maturin provide a historical context for later reformulations of the genre by Somerville and Ross, Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane, William Trevor, Jennifer Johnston, Aidan Higgins, and John Banville.

This is the perfect overview of the Irish novel from the seventeenth century to the present day.