The Anglo-Irish Big House Novel

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The term "big house" refers to the country mansions that English settlers built in Ireland as a part of England's colonization of Ireland. "Anglo-Irish" refers to these settlers and their descendants. In this course, students will read nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century works that examine the Anglo-Irish big house and discuss the tense relationship between the native Irish and the Anglo-Irish. Students will read works that lament the fall of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy such as Maria Edgeworth's "Castle Rackrent" as well as the incredibly sardonic "Good Behaviour" by Molly Keane. We will also investigate Seamus Deane's suggestion that Bram Stoker's Dracula is a big house novel and examine how Elizabeth Bowen uses the supernatural to describe her experiences as an Anglo-Irish woman in the mid-twentieth century. Students will analyze the tenuous position of the Anglo-Irish class that resulted from them being neither the colonizing English nor the colonized Irish and thus disowned by both. This course will give students a foundation in modern and contemporary Irish literature, history, and culture.