Consultation Hours Academic Year 2012-13

By appointment

Emer Nolan studied for her BA and MA degrees at University College Dublin and received her PhD from the University of Cambridge.  She was a Junior Research Fellow in the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen’s University Belfast and a lecturer in University College Dublin before joining the Department of English in NUI Maynooth.   Her main teaching and research interests are in the areas of   Irish writing (especially fiction), modernism and literary/cultural theory.  She is the author of two books on modern Irish writing (James Joyce and Nationalism and Catholic Emancipations: Irish Fiction from Thomas Moore to James Joyce) and of essays and reviews on various topics in Irish literary and cultural studies.  She has edited Thomas Moore’s satirical history of Ireland, Memoirs of Captain Rock (1824), and is working on a book about Irish women artists and political figures between 1960 and 2008.

Publications

Catholic Emancipations (Syracuse University Press, 2007)

Tracing the history of the Catholic-authored novel in nineteenth-century Ireland, from its origins during the Catholic political resurgence of the 1820s to its transformation by James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922,  Nolan offers a unique tour of Ireland’s literary landscape. Exploring a literary line too often overlooked in favor of Irish Gothic, she challenges received histories of nineteenth-century Irish fiction, and shows how an emergent and sometimes combative Catholic middle class generated its own idiosyncratic narrative forms.

She offers a major reassessment of such figures as Thomas Moore, George Moore, and Charles Kickham and of sentimental fiction in nineteenth-century Ireland. With keen insight and deft arguments, Nolan presents a highly original exploration of James Joyce and his relationship to his nineteenth-century Irish Catholic predecessors. At once provocative and enlightening, Catholic Emancipations is an invaluable addition to the fields of Irish studies, Joyce studies, and the nineteenth-century novel. Catholic Emancipations was the runner-up for the 2007 Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature awarded by the American Conference for Irish Studies.

Memoirs of Captain Rock (Field Day Publications, 2008)

Thomas Moore's Memoirs of Captain Rock gives Irish rebellion one of its most memorable representations in fiction. Its blend of literary and historical elements secured it a place among the innovatory hybrid works of the Romantic age such as the national tale and the historical novel. This eye-opening edition - enhanced by learned editing, a perspicuous introduction and shrewd notes - will win new readers for what was, in its time, a phenomenally successful publication.

Joyce and Nationalism (Routledge, 1995)

Joyce and Nationalism overturns the conventional thinking about Joyce and his relationship to the aesthetics and politics of his time. Nolan addresses the reappraisal of both modernism and nationalism in contemporary critical debates, asking how the Joyce we read now has been constituted by modernism and how modernism itself has been in part constituted by its appropriation of Joyce. Equally she asks us to reconsider the avowed hostility of Joyce's writings to Irish nationalism and the new bearings of his work revealed by post-structuralist and feminist theory.