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SEIS Academic Forum Series （No.721 ）

Forum on Irish Studies

Victorian Britain’s embarrassment: Ireland, its Land and its Fiction

Speaker:  Prof. James H. Murphy (Boston College, USA)

Time:  15:00-17:00

Date: May 21, 2019 (Tuesday)

Venue: Room 507 of the Executive Building (行政楼507)

Abstract:

In the nineteenth century Ireland was part of the United Kingdom but a very discontent part. Not only did many Irish people appear to want self-rule but they were discontented with the land system in which British-descended landlords owned the holdings of small Irish farmers. It was a recipe for continuing friction and fiction was one of the ways in which the British public attempted to work out its attitude to troublesome Ireland. Were the Irish loveable but slightly dim-witted or were they violent and monstrous? This lecture will examine the ways in which novelists, both British and Irish, presented the situation and attempted to imagine solutions.

About the speaker:

Professor James H. Murphy is director of Center for Irish Studies at Boston College, USA, and a member of the editorial board of the well-reputed journal New Hibernia Review. He is a distinguished scholar in Victorian literature and history, and his recent publications include Ireland’s Czar: Gladstonian Government and the Lord Lieutenancies of the Red Earl Spencer, 1868-86 (2014)，Irish Novelists and the Victorian Age (2011) and Abject Loyalty: Nationalism and Monarchy in Ireland, during the reign of Queen Victoria (2001).