SOURCE: A review of Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, in Modern Language Quarterly,Vol. 58, No. 1, March, 1997, pp. 114-18.

In the following review, Trumpener offers positive assessment of Heathcliff and the Great Hunger and comments on the book's critical reception.

Over the last twenty years groundbreaking books by British, Irish, and American academics have shaped a new field of Irish literary and cultural studies. A series of monographic studies in the tradition of Daniel Corkery's Synge and Anglo Irish Literature (1931) have used the oeuvres and careers of particular authors to show how Ireland's social conditions and political tensions molded Anglo-Irish consciousness and literature, from Swift's counter-Augustan aesthetic to a peculiarly Anglo-Irish mode of gothic.¹ And a series of ambitious historical overviews, essay collections, and anthologies have explored the status of Ireland as an exemplary or prototypical British colony, the continuities and discontinuities of Anglo-Irish culture, and the shifting relationship...