Drunkenness in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Irish Literature

Examines the shifting constructions of drunkenness in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Irish literature

• The first full-length study of drunkenness in eighteenth and nineteenth century Irish literature
• A ground-breaking examination of a key aspect of Irish cultural identity
• Has a wide-ranging scope, covering the early eighteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century
• Analyses the works of major Irish writers including Jonathan Swift, Maria Edgeworth, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker
• Takes an interdisciplinary approach combining historiography, medical humanities and sociopolitical perspectives

Since the emergence of the ‘Stage Irishman’ in early modern London, Ireland’s national character, both at home and abroad, has been associated with drunkenness. Today, this fondness for drink is marketed as a sign of Irish people’s irrepressible sociability, but historically it was read as evidence of an innate propensity for disorder. This book tracks depictions of drunkenness in Irish literature alongside international trends, such as the medicalisation of ‘habitual drunkenness’ in the late-eighteenth century, the rise of the Temperance Movement in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the dawn of the Age of Psychiatry in the later nineteenth century. As this book demonstrates, in Ireland these developments were filtered through a distinct political reality, one in which an insecure colonial elite sought to defend its position in the context of the vexed question of the country’s capacity for self-governance.