Introduction / John Wilson Foster -- The novel before 1800 / Aileen Douglas -- The national tale and allied genres, 1770s-1840s / Miranda Burgess -- The novel of the big house / Vera Kreilkamp -- The gothic novel / Siobhán Kilfeather -- Catholics and fiction during the Union, 1801-1922 / James H. Murphy -- Irish modernisms, 1880-1930 / Adrian Frazier -- James Joyce / Bruce Stewart -- Region, realism and reaction, 1922-1972 / Norman Vance -- The novel in Irish / Alan Titley -- Women novelists, 1930s-1960s / Ann Owens Weekes -- Two post-modern novelists : Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien / Terence Brown -- Life writing in the twentieth century / Elizabeth Grubgeld -- The novel and the northern troubles / Elmer Kennedy-Andrews -- Contemporary Irish fiction / Eve Patten.