Introduction: A history of the Irish novel, 1665–2010

While some literary critics have traced the origins of the novel back to ancient Greece, the modern novel as an access to the narratives of bourgeois modernity emerged into Western culture in the late seventeenth century. The struggle of the bourgeois towards definition and the striving to articulate its character is central to the novel and the stories it tells. Its novelty is found in a formlessness that nonetheless aspires to some idea of order and unity. Indeed, the energies of the early modern novel form can be discerned in its constant assertion of narratives that enact that search for completeness while also allowing for a kind of mourning for the security that older, traditional forms and stories allowed. Thus, novelists, then as now, revel in the possibilities that formal innovation permits, while their characters find themselves forced to acknowledge the newness of their world and their experiences in that world. The novel’s link to news, as something immediate and pertinent, is obvious as it self-consciously craves to be the chronicler of the here and now, each novel trying to encapsulate the urgency of being indispensably relevant. And yet, as Franco Moretti argues, while traditionally tied to the codification of bourgeois values, the novel is actually a means for the pre-modern imagination to continue to inhabit the modern capitalist world. In other words, while the novel encapsulates Enlightenment thinking in its exposure of the inner machinations of the individual consciousness, and of laying bare all that had been until this moment hidden, it also harbours within it that which opposes such revelatory actions, suggesting realms beyond positivist knowledge, hinting at mysteries outside accepted epistemological structures. Thus, the destructive elements of the pre-modern picaro – the character that would dismantle the codes of polite society even as he or she apes them and who would, in their blatantly self-centred individuality, simply ignore communal values – are