From Castle Rackrent to Castle Dracula

<p><strong><em>Paul E H Davis and the Irish Land Question</em></strong></p><p>In his challenging new book<strong> Paul E H Davis </strong>offers an entirely new critique of how novelists in nineteenth-century Ireland had to act -both as writers and historians - in their attempts to find a solution to what became the Irish Land Question.</p><p>Callenging the widely-held nationalist view that Irish novelists of this period had little or nothing to offer Davis slots these castaway novelists into a new identifiable category:<strong> the agrarian novelists.</strong></p><p>The book is divided into three parts. <em>Part One</em> considers novelists writing between the Union and the Famine:<strong> Maria Edgeworth Gerald Griffin John and Michael Banim</strong> and<strong> William Carleton.</strong> <em>Part Two</em> looks at how the agrarian novel 'emigrates' with reference to the novels of <strong>Charles Kickham</strong> and to the Irish novels of <strong>Anthony Trollope.</strong> <em>Part Three</em> considers how some agrarian novelists - specifically <strong>Thomas Moore</strong> and <strong>Bram Stoker</strong> - felt the solution lay not in the real world but in the world of fantasy.</p><p>An exceptional book on why the agrarian novelists deserve to be valued for their unique perception of Ireland in the nineteenth century.</p>