Helen O'connell, Ireland and the Fiction of Improvement (Book Review‪)‬

Helen O'Connell, Ireland and the Fiction of Improvement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 240 pages. GBP 53.00 (hardback). In an absorbing study of Irish literary culture in the post-Union period, Ireland and the Fiction of Improvement brings together a body of familiar and less well-known authors to describe a hitherto neglected tradition of 'improvement' writing which, its author argues, represents a regional expression of the 'stable, ... liberal realism' that dominated nineteenth-century print culture in English (p.1). Examining the fictional narratives and instructive dialogues of improvement tracts, Helen O'Connell finds a body of writing which figures social unity, stable communities, and flourishing agricultural economies. The Ireland of this canon is a liberal, enlightened textual terrain, above sectarian and political tension, removed from the 'romance' of grinding poverty, and insensible to millenarian, revolutionary fantasy--a space of calm economic progress and agricultural modernization. Improvement fiction itself constitutes a restrained and practical genre, whose realist and didactic discourse embodied the social values it sought to produce.