The Princess Grace Irish Library’s 2000 symposium brought together Irish critics and historians to assess the state of culture and society in the 'long nineteenth century' – 1800-1922 – during which the Act of Union defined the form of government and representation in Ireland as well as, to a great extent, the forms of opposition. Besides investigating the nature of the Union – its strengths and weaknesses, its character and progress – this bicentenary collection considers questions of private conscience and popular consciousness, language and iconography, science and evangelism, Diaspora and disempowerment, terror and consent, memory and amnesia, separation and adherence in the connected spheres of society, politics and culture.

The contributors are Anthony Cronin, Thomas Bartlett, Síghle Breathnach-Lynch, Claire Connolly, Tom Dunne, Marianne Elliott, J. W. Foster, Roy Foster, Luke Gibbons, Liam Kennedy, Joep Leerssen, W. J. McCormack, James Murphy, Patrick O'Sullivan, Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh and Norman Vance. It is the thirteenth publication in the Princess Grace Irish Library Literary series (ISSN 0269-2619).

BRUCE STEWART is the Literary Adviser of the Princess Grace Irish Library, Monaco, and teaches Anglo-Irish Literature at the University of Ulster at Coleraine. He served as Assistant Editor of The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature edited by Robert Welch (1995). More recently he was responsible for the setting up of PGIL EIRData, a large-scale website dedicated to Irish literary and biographical information and containing at its heart a bio-bibliographical account of some 4,500 Irish authors of all periods. It was launched by Her Excellency Mary McAleese, President of Ireland, and H. S. H. Prince Albert during the symposium, and is located at http://www.pgil-eirdata.org.

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