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The area of 19th-century German travel writing on Ireland has received widespread scholarly attention over the years in treatises in both English and German, but these efforts were directed largely at fellow-scholars and formed part of an academic discourse on travel, interculturality and alterity. This book, on the other hand, is conceived of more as a reader for the general public than as an academic treatise, presents a surprisingly extensive body of comments drawn from German and Austrian sources from between 1783 and 1865 and lets them talk for themselves . Some of these remarkably empathetic and well-founded eye-witness accounts were translated into English already in the 19th century by people like Sarah Austin and Sir Lascelles Wraxhall, but the editor has re-translated them to remove varying degrees of antiquatedness of formulation and has added other accounts that were hitherto largely unknown to the non-German-speaking reading public.

Eoin Bourke, born in Dublin in 1939; emeritus professor of German Studies at National University of Ireland, Galway; undergraduate studies and doctorate at Munich University; author of books on the literature of the late romantic and post-romantic period and the Austrian Anschluss in history and literature as well as of many articles in several research areas including Vormärz, travel and expedition literature, migrant literature, the critical folk play, literature as testimony and German-Jewish studies.