19th century AD

Eire-Ireland:Journal of Irish Studies, Spring-Summer, 2001 by Catherine M. Eagan

(9) Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 47-48.

(10) If Protestant readers were not numerous, the novelists at least hoped to give Irish-American Catholic readers plenty of ammunition with which to defend their faith. The novelists feared that their fellow immigrants would convert to Protestantism in order to increase their potential for employment, and cast aside their love for their country in order to assimilate.

(11) See, for example, Sadlier, New Lights 224; John Boyce, Mary Lee; Or, The Yankee in Ireland, reprinted in Wright American Fiction, microfilm, Vol. 2, 352 ff. Sadlier was the wife of James Sadlier, who with his brother Denis owned the largest Catholic publishing house in America: Fanning, Irish Voice, 114-15.

(12)John McElgun, Annie Reilly; or, The Fortunes of an Irish Girl in New York, reprinted in Wright American Fiction, microfilm, Vol. 2, 170. See also Dillon O'Brien, The Dalys of Dalystown (Saint Paul: Pioneer Printing Company, 1866), 90-91.

(13) The intelligence and devotion of the Catholic faithful, despite their lesser emphasis on scripture, was a favorite theme of many authors. See McElgun, AnnieReilly, 170; Boyce, Shandy M'Guire; or, Tricks upon Travellers: Being a Story of the North of Ireland, reprinted in Wright American Fiction, microfilm, Vol. 2, 32; Hugh Quigley, Profit and Loss: A Story of the Life of the Genteel Irish-American, Illustrative of Godless Education, reprinted in Wright American Fiction, microfilm, Vol. 2, 320; and Sadlier, New Lights, 224, Con O'Regan; or, Emigrant Life in the New World (New York: D. and J. Sadlier and Company, 1864), 308, and Willy Burke; or, The Irish Orphan in America (Boston: Thomas B. Noonan and Company, 1850), 158.

(14) See especially Peter McCorry's Mount Benedict; or, The Violated Tomb, a Tale of the Charlestown Convent, reprinted in Wright American Fiction, microfilm, Vol. 2. His novel is a fictionalization of the burning of the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1834. According to Fanning, McCorry was an "Ulster Catholic immigrant journalist and ardent Irish nationalist," who lived and wrote in Boston and New York. Fanning, Irish Voice, 79. For more on the riots and the exaggerated "captivity narratives" of convent life written by Protestants, see Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

(15) Mary Meany, The Confessors of Connaught; or, The Tenants of a Lord Bishop (Philadelphia: Peter E Cunningham, 1865), 58. For more learned priests, see Boyce's Shandy M'Guire and Mary Lee; Quigley's The Cross and the Shamrock; Alice Nolan's The Byrnes of Glengoulah: A True Tale (1869), reprinted in Wright American Fiction, microfilm, Vol. 2, 42-43; Sadlier's Confessions of an Apostate (1903; New York: Arno Press, 1978), 67; and D. P. Conyngham's The O'Donnells of Glen Cottage: A Tale of the Famine (1874; P. J. Kenedy, 1895), 64.