Publisher's Synopsis
The Big House motif has long been prominent in Anglo-Irish literature, but a comprehensive study of the subject is still awaited. Ancestral Voices brings together new essays on relevant work by Maria Edgeworth, Charles Lever, George Moore, Somerville and Ross, W.B. Yeats, Lennox Robinson, Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane, Aidan Higgins, Jennifer Johnston, John Banville and William Trevor. The book opens with two general surveys, 'The Big House and Irish History' and 'Continuity and Change in Irish Fiction', concluding with a consideration of the social and material culture on the Big House as it exists today. The thirteen contributors are drawn from Ireland, Germany, Austria and the United States. The editor, Otto Rauchbauer, teaches at the University of Vienna.
