Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690-1830, is the first book to apply recent trends in new materialist criticism to Ireland. Each of the chapters engages a focused case study of an everyday object in colonial Ireland (coins, flax, spinning wheels, mud, and pigs) to examine how each object’s unique materiality contributed to the colonial ideology of British paternalism and afforded creative Irish expression.

The main argument of Irish Materialisms is its methodology: of reading literature through the agency of materiality and nonhuman narrative in order to gain a more egalitarian and varied understanding of colonial experience. Through the details of a flax thread spun for linen or a mud cabin built with human hands alone, we can better understand the violence of Britain’s colonial policy and see, with new eyes, the depth and complexity of native Irish life in literature.