The Irish Voice in America: 250 Years of Irish-American Fiction

In this study, Charles Fanning has written the first general account of the origins and development of a literary tradition among American writers of Irish birth or background who have explored the Irish immigrant or ethnic experience in works of fiction. The result is a portrait of the evolving fictional self-consciousness of an immigrant group over a span of 250 years.

Fanning traces the roots of Irish-American writing back to the eighteenth century and carries it forward through the traum...