William Carleton’s and Charles Kickham’s Ethnographic Realism

Abstract

This chapter focuses on William Carleton and Charles Joseph Kickham, two Irish writers who received critical and popular acclaim for their truthful portrayals of Irish life in the nineteenth century but are understood as ethnographic rather than realist writers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Questioning this distinction between realism and ethnography by studying narrative metalepsis within their novels, the chapter argues that both Carleton and Kickham demonstrate how institutions imagine a future that depends upon forgetting. Remembering what institutions work to forget, the politically conservative Carleton legitimates traditional practices that institutions seek to root out while Kickham, a Fenian who advocated revolution, cultivates an anti-institutional and anti-English political stance.