First Life—and then Fame

Katherine Cecil Thurston’s 1910 novel, Max, explores the bohemian Paris of the fin-de-siècle through the eyes of a young artist newly arrived from Russia. This young man is, however, actually a young princess in disguise, trying to escape an abusive marriage. Through the use of disguise and the New Woman figure of the female-to-male transvestite, this novel represents Paris through two competing genres: the masculine adventure narrative and the female romance.

A City She must Postpone: A Conclusion

This conclusion looks forward into the mid-twentieth-century works of Kate O’Brien in order to demonstrate the ongoing significance of Paris in Irish women’s novels. In three different bildungsromane, her protagonists experience different Parisian spaces. This analysis demonstrates that those spaces ultimately determine the type of Bildung available to those characters.

Much More than Only Le Bel Irlandois

Thischapter reverses critical understandings of Maria Edgeworth’s representation of Paris in her last Irish Tale, which have often characterized the scenes in France as an interlude. Instead, this analysis reveals the complex role Paris plays in positioning Edgeworth’s writings in dialogue with the leading ideas of the French Enlightenment, especially those of the Abbé Morellet. Ormond’s Bildung becomes a rejection of speculative investments in favour of a more socially responsible form of economics.

The Novice in the City

This chapter explores two competing representations of Paris in an early- and a late-career novel by Sydney Owenson. It argues that, in The Novice of Saint Dominick, Paris functions as a conservative site of socialization, while in The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys, the French capital becomes a site of liberal reforms and social mobility.In the earlier novel, Owenson focuses on the dangers of a woman’s involvement in metropolitan economics in order to enforce her submission to a masculine authority through the use of debts and cosmopolitan understandings of the market. The later novel uses the Paris Opera house to highlight the development of urban literacy.

Parvenir: An Introduction

This chapter establishes the need for Irish Studies to look beyond the geo-social space of Ireland. By emphasising the central cultural role Paris plays in nineteenth-century literature, it demonstrates the significance the city should play in studies of nineteenth-century Irish literature. This focus on Paris establishes the book’s key lines of inquiry: the connection between the city, economics, self-determination, and the capitalist Bildungsroman.

The New Jerusalem and the Rue Vavin

It is well known that Somerville and Ross were deeply influenced by the art of fin-de-siècle Paris, but little scholarship explores their representations of that city. This chapter argues that the individual’s ability to exist within the city is firstly determined by one’s relationship to economics, which is, fundamentally, shaped by one’s gender. For Somerville and Ross, Paris in the nineteenth century is a place of artistic possibilities that is not equally available.