Lives and Adventures 2: Irish Men and the Eighteenth-Century Novel

‘Lives and Adventures 2: Irish Men and the Eighteenth-Century Novel’ contrasts the situation of eighteenth-century novels by and about women, which introduced new forms of interiority to fiction, with those written by men, characterised by the precarity of the novel-reading (and -writing) classes in Ireland, and their awareness of living in a culture in which definitions of a ‘gentleman’ were dangerously unfixed. This produces literary forms that are constantly veering towards the unstable and anti-mimetic territory of satire, allegory, and the picaresque, notably Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Michael Clancy’s The Memoirs of Michael Clancy, M.D. (1750), or Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). These works both mark developments in the rise of the novel and, simultaneously, threaten to disrupt the novel’s nascent form. Equally, each of these works involves characters who are in some respect physically maimed, such as Clancy’s protagonist who goes blind, bringing the tale to an end.