Description: This lively new book by renowned critic Terry Eagleton provides a novel account of Ireland's neglected national intellectuals. This extraordinary group, a sort of Irish version of Bloomsbury, included such figures as Oscar Wilde's father William, Charles Lever, Samuel Ferguson, Isaac Butt, and Sheridan Le Fanu. Doctors, lawyers, economists, and writers -- amateurs rather than academics -- much of their work was published in the pages of the Dublin University Magazine. These figures were deeply caught up in networks of kinship, sharing cultural interests and intersecting biographies in the outsized village of nineteenth-century Dublin. Through the lens of Antonio Gramsci's definitions of traditional and organic intellectuals, Eagleton explores the preoccupations of this remarkable community in all its fascinating ferment and diversity. He maps the nature of its relation to the Young Ireland movement, combining his account with some reflections on the nature of intellectual work in general and its place in political life.

Scholars and Rebels makes fascinating reading for all those interested in not just the complexities of nineteenth-century Irish intellectual culture and the emergent Irish Revival, but in the formation of modem Irish culture in the twentieth century.

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