List of illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. ‘Brethren and sisters going abroad’: Irish Travel Writing Beyond the Grand Tour -- 2. Towards ‘Mass’ Irish Tourism: Infrastructures of Travel and of Public Discourse -- 3. Utilitarians, Nationalist Pilgrims and Time Travellers: Carrying and Seeing Ireland Abroad -- 4. Continental Catholic Spaces through Irish Eyes -- 5. Sisters Abroad: Constructing the Irish Female Tourist -- 6. Home or Abroad? ‘West Britons’ and Continental Travel -- 7. ‘Yes, the newspapers were right’: Revisiting Tourism in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- .

This book analyses travel texts aimed at the emergent Irish middle classes in the long nineteenth century. Unlike travel writing about Ireland, Irish travel writing about foreign spaces has been under-researched. Drawing on a wide range of neglected material and focusing on selected European destinations, this study draws out the distinctive features of an Irish corpus that often subverts dominant trends in Anglo-Saxon travel writing. As it charts Irish participation in a new ‘mass’ tourism, it shows how that participation led to heated ideological debates in Victorian and Edwardian Irish print culture. Those debates culminate in James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, which is here re-read through new discursive contextualizations. This book sheds new light on middle-class culture in pre-independence Ireland, and on Ireland’s relation to Europe. The methodology used to define its Irish corpus also makes innovative contributions to the study of travel writing. .