Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- 1 A Long Conversation -- Introduction -- Discourse and the Novel -- 2 The Mild Irish Girl: Domesticating the National Tale -- The Wild Irish Girl: Owenson -- The Mild Irish Girl: Edgeworth -- 3 Ormond: From "The Disease of Power and Wealth" to "The Condition of Irishness" -- Nineteenth-Century Culture Wars -- Exclusive Inclusion: Ormond -- "The Pistol Accidentally Went Off": Ormond and Familial Politics -- Curing "The Condition of Irishness" -- 4 Transcending Ascendancy: Florence McCarthy -- Contesting Edgeworth -- "Neither in Command nor Supplication" -- 5 Policing "The Chief Nests of Disease and Broils" -- Introduction -- Inferior Irish Criminality -- The Migratory Thesis -- "Women Half-Naked Carrying Brickbats and Stones" -- 6 Kay, Engels, and the Condition of the Irish -- Introduction -- "Banish the Jealous Suspicion with Which One Order Regards Another" -- The Two Nations: Working Class and Bourgeoisie -- 7 British National Identity and Irish Anti-Domesticity in Pre-Famine British Literature and Criticism -- Introduction -- Class Hysteria: Croker -- Happy Beef and Pudding: Thackeray's Anti-Romance -- Anti-Domesticity and the Return of the Colonial Repressed: Barry Lyndon -- Female Strength as a Demonic Force: Irish Anti-Domesticity and the British Middle Class -- 8 A Comic Plot with a Tragic Ending: The Macdermots of Ballycloran -- Trollope and Ireland -- The Seduction Plot -- Striking at the Corrupt Power Structure, not Union -- 9 The Sacred, the Profane, and the Middle Class: Thackeray's Post-Famine Criticism and Pendennis -- "Why Am I to Keep an Irishman?" -- "Irish Beggary and Ruin Follows the March of Our History" -- Mythic Nation-building: Pendennis -- 10 Allegory for the End of Union: Trollope's An Eye for an Eye -- Seduction Plot: Suite -- Unimagined Community -- Bibliography.

Works Cited: Primary Sources -- Works Cited: Secondary Sources -- Further Reading -- Index.