This, the first of three volumes, spans the first third of the nineteenth century. It documents Ireland’s significant literary contribution to an age of invention, with Thomas Moore’s romantic Melodies, Maria Edgeworth’s regional fiction, and Charles Maturin’s voyeuristic Gothic stories. It witnesses the rise of a quest for authenticity - mapping and transmuting the Gaelic past (in Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy , Petrie’s essay on the round towers, and O'Curry’s research into Irish manuscripts) and faithfully depicting the real Ireland (in the first-hand accounts of Mary Leadbeater, William Hamilton Maxwell, Asenath Nicholson, the peasant fiction of William Carleton and the Catholic fiction of the Banim brothers). In Jonah Barrington’s Sketches it records the demise of the rollicking squirearchy, while in the stories of Lover it portrays the rise of the stage Irishman. But it also offers a selection from political documents and speeches, and from popular writings which were imprinted on the Irish consciousness. These are contextualised by historical documents, and by Irish forays into European Romanticism.