This interdisciplinary collection focuses on the history of the future and in particular how Irish people in the nineteenth century thought about their future, in many different ways and contexts. It spans the long nineteenth century from c. 1800 to c. 1914 and includes both people living on the island of Ireland and the Irish abroad, women and men, the religious and the secular, the governing and the governed. It explores – both individually and collectively – the various hopes, dreams, fears and visions of the future that permeated through nineteenth-century Ireland and Irish life. The collection also analyses how the Irish future was conceptualized and understood in different cultural contexts, how visions of the future shifted in relation to the present and the past, and how the future was instrumentalized for political, religious or other social agendas. It attempts to go beyond the usual political or religious discourses on what the future might hold for Irish people and consider a broader spectrum of witnesses from a mixture of historical and literary sources.

CONTRIBUTORS: Patrick Bethel, Richard J. Butler, Pauline Collombier-Lakeman, Sophie Cooper, Catherine Healy, Peter Hession, Raphaël Ingelbien, Jim Kelly, Fiona Lyons, Aoife O'Leary McNeice, Patrick Maume, Christopher P. Morash, Loughlin J. Sweeney.