Hirsch, Edward. ‘The Imaginary Irish Peasant’, in PMLA, 106, 5 (October 1991), pp.1116-33.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Irish peasant was a figure deeply encoded with social, political and literary meaning, and to speak or write about that central image of Irish identity in the context of the time was to participate in a special kind of cultural discourse. The country people were important to Irish cultural and political nationalists not for their own sake but because of what they signified as a concept and as a language. To speak about the “peasant” was always to speak about something beyond rural life. (p.118; quoted in Salome Houston, PG Dip., UUC 2012.)