"The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction represents the entire canon of Irish fiction in English from Jonathan Swift, born in 1667, to Emma Donoghue, born in 1969. In his comprehensive introduction Colm Toibin describes the particular difficulties faced by Irish writers before the twentieth century, which gave rise to forms of fiction that were strikingly different from the classic French and English novels of the nineteenth century. In a culture where certain connections between the writer and the reader - indeed between the individual and society itself - were absent, it was Gothic literature, with its menacing visions of crumbling houses and discontented peasants, that flourished. "--Jacket.