Regular Wild Irish: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in Irish American Fiction

Abstract

Regular Wild Irish: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in Irish American Fiction examines the ways in which Irish American writers construct "Irishness" in fictional texts which borrow from and respond to literary and cultural discourses in the United States and Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It analyzes the short fiction and novels of Irish immigrant and Irish American authors writing from the antebellum period through the early twentieth century and particularly focuses on those figures who were publishing in the 1890s. Regular Wild Irish considers the links between the representational strategies used by Irish American writers and broader domestic and international discourses of race and ethnicity in the period. It argues that, while participating in various U.S. literary traditions such as sentimentalism, regionalism, and realism, Irish American writers complicated standard literary and visual representations of Irishness. Regular Wild Irish establishes that Irish American writers mobilized key, if sometimes competing, cultural discourses to shape an image of the American Irish that both engaged with national and transatlantic popular and literary discourses and theorized emergent forms of ethnic and racial identification in the late nineteenth century. Ultimately, Regular Wild Irish demonstrates that if, at the turn into the twenty-first century, Irishness is a "politically insulated" form of ethnic identity fashionable at a moment when white identity seems to be "losing its social purchase," then it is worth thinking seriously about how Irishness was represented at the turn into the twentieth century, when the terms "white" and "Irish" bore a different, if related, set of anxieties than they do today.