Irish Cultures of Travel, 1st ed. 2016 Writing on the Continent, 1829-1914 New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature Series

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. 

Raphaël Ingelbien is Reader in Literary Studies at the University of Leuven, Belgium. He is the author of Misreading England: Poetry and Nationhood since the Second World War (2002), and has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and Irish writing in various journals and edited collections. 

Whereas most monographs look at travel inside Ireland, this book looks outwards at Irish travel on the continent Examines a wide range of materials, from periodicals to canonical fiction such as Joyce’s Dubliners Interdisciplinary – will appeal to Irish cultural historians as well as tourism studies academics