A positive interest in the Irish past emerged among English-writing (“Anglo-Irish”) authors in the later 18th century, as part of the political climate of Enlightenment Patriotism and the Ossian-inspired interest in Northern, non-classical antiquity; e.g. Gorges Howard’s The siege of Tamor (1773) and Francis Dobbs’s The patriot king, or, Irish chief (1774). Following the crisis of the 1798 Rebellion and the 1800-01 Act of Union, the only author to maintain this Patriot-inspired Irish historicism was the Whiggish Lady Morgan, née Owenson, daughter of an Irish actor, who wrote a number of “National Tales” explaining Ireland’s culture, history and contemporary plight, with many historical digressions: The wild Irish girl (1806), O’Donnell (1814), Florence Macarthy (1818), The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys (1827).

The genre of the National Tale was, indeed, a type of historicist fiction flourishing alongside, and independently of, the Walter Scott-style historical novel. Among its practitioners were, besides Morgan, Charles Robert Maturin (The wild Irish boy, 1808; The Milesian chief, 1812) and the more radical Banim brothers, John (1798–1842, author of The Boyne water, 1826) and Michael (1796–1874), who jointly authored the Tales of the O’Hara family (1825-26). The genre of the National Tale declined after Catholic Emancipation (1828: the lifting of civic disabilities from Ireland’s majority Catholic population). Historicist interest was catered for by the rapid rise of popular narrative histories, and by the immensely popular genre of historically-themed ballad poetry; Irish-themed novels tended to develop into the register of rustic Realism. The first successful author of novels set in contemporary Irish society had been Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849; Castle Rackrent, 1800; The absentee, 1812). By the 1840s, Irish-themed novels often involved swaggering or comic heroes and picaresque plotlines, but the rustic-realist genre was also used to denounce the oppression of the Irish peasantry under British rule and landlordism; thus in Knocknagow, or the homes of Tipperary (1879) by the radical separatist nationalist Charles Kickham (1828–1882), or the plays of Dion Boucicault (1820–1890), which were aimed primarily at Irish-American audiences. In addition to the iniquitous landlord system, the experience of the Great Famine of the 1840s provided lasting, bitter, inspiration for rustic tales that were the very opposite of idyllic.

Historical fiction meanwhile became a genre aimed at a more juvenile readership and accordingly foregrounding adventurous stories on historical topics. The trend was set by Samuel Ferguson’s Hibernian nights’ entertainments, serialized in the Dublin university magazine from 1834 onwards. Such juvenile historical adventure tales were to remain popular for the next century. A decisive new inflection was added when Standish James O’Grady began to use not just historical episodes from the late medieval and early modern periods, but heroic tales from the legendary Fenian and Ulster cycles (Finn and his companions, 1892; The coming of Cuculain, 1894). Ferguson also made Gaelic antiquity the inspiration for more ambitious epic verse, such as Lays of the Western Gael (1865) and the verse epic Congal (1872).

This use of heroic-mythical material, largely gleaned from Eugene O’Curry’s published university lectures, was to dominate the agenda of the Irish Literary Revival dramatists around William Butler Yeats. While part of the thematics of these playwrights involved the dignified/tragic, or else humorously comic, life of the Irish peasantry (picking up on the earlier tradition of rustic Realism), their plays also highlighted scenes from Ireland’s heroic-legendary Gaelic past: witness Alice Milligan’s The last feast of the Fianna (1900), George Moore and W.B. Yeats’s Diarmuid and Grania (1901), J.M. Synge’s Deirdre of the sorrows (1910). Remarkably, this literary historicism was pursued in the theatre rather than in the novel (which, from George Moore to James Joyce, was set firmly in a contemporary naturalistic mode). What is more, these plays aimed, not at historical Realism, but rather at the evocation of a semi-legendary otherworld as an ontological, high-minded alternative to the contemporary reality of English-dominated provincialism. The only exception was Yeats’s overtly activist-propagandist Cathleen ní Houlihan (1902), which evoked a scene from the 1798 Rebellion to present a mythical Ireland-figure demanding the courageous sacrifice of her young men in the anti-British struggle.

Yeats later speculated that this play may have drawn its audiences towards the violence of the post-1916 insurrection. Indeed, Cathleen ní Houlihan marked the high point of the collaboration between the Irish Literary Revival and separatist Irish nationalism. Yeats and the authors around him (who had their own differences, torn as they were both between naturalism and symbolism, and between popular outreach and elitist exclusiveness), intended to develop, in the spirit of the Norwegian theatre revival after Ibsen and the new art theatres of Paris, a “national” theatre for Ireland: transcending provincial commercialism in order to participate in the vanguard of European literary taste. The repertoire accordingly included world classics adapted to Irish stagings, as well as original productions of a nativist “national” inspiration, both mythical-legendary and rustic-realist. The nationalistic part of the Dublin audiences clamoured for anti-British propaganda value rather than aesthetic pretensions and suspected Yeats of cosmopolitan and anti-“national” snobbery. The uneasy balancing act unravelled in the years after Cathleen ní Houlihan.

In the years around 1900, the revival of the Gaelic language gained momentum, and fresh literature (verse, prose and an occasional dramatic sketch) began to be produced in it. Most of this was in the genre of autobiographical memoir (Peadar Ua Laoghaire, Mo sgéal féin, 1915) or in the style of the oral folk tale (Douglas Hyde, Casadh an tsúgáin, “Twisting the rope”, 1901; Ua Laoghaire, Séadna, 1904). No Gaelic-language historical novel emerged in these or later years, although there was a continuing English-language production of popular novels on Irish (historical as well as rustic) themes.