Narrating cultural encounter: Lady Morgan and the Irish national tale

Nineteenth-Century Literature

Volumn 51, Issue 3, 1996, Pages

  Ferris, Ina ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949693661     PISSN: 08919356     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/ncl.1996.51.3.99p0239a     Document Type: Article

References (24)

1. Charles Robert Maturin: His Life and Works (Helsingfors: Helsingfors Centraltryckeri, 1923), p. 70
2. and Nicola J. Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 17901825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), chap. 3
3. The most extensive and complex discussion of the genre to date is by Katie Trumpener, "National Character, Nationalist Plots: National Tale and Historical Novel in the Age of Waverley, 1806-1830," ELH, 60 (1993), 685-731
4. For a theorizing of narrative itself as interactive and performative, see Marie Maclean, Narrative as Performance: The Baudelairean Experiment (London: Routledge, 1988)
5. See Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991)
6. Rev. of The Wild Irish Girl, Monthly Review, n.s. 57 (1808), 379
7. Morgan, Prefatory Address, The Wild Irish Girl, rev. ed. (London: Henry Colburn, 1846), p. xxvi
8. Heathclijf and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso, 1995), p. 201
9. Deane, "Irish National Character 1790-1900," in The Writer as Witness: Literature as Historical Evidence, ed. Tom Dunne (Cork: Cork Univ. Press, 1987), p. 103
10. Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders of Scotland: To which Are Added, Translations From the Gaelic; and Letters Connected with those Formerly Published, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1811), I, 10
11. "Novels Descriptive of Irish Life," Edinburgh Review, 52 (1831), 41l-12
12. Comments like this bring to mind Jerome Christensen's recent charge that the Edgeworths "depeculiarized" the Irish. It is certainly the case that they sought to discipline and regularize the native Irish in conformity with their liberal ideology, but it is also the case that the glamour of remaining "peculiar" is generally more apparent to those already safely inside dominant discourses (see Christensen, The Romantic Movement at the End of History," Critical Inquiry, 20 [1994], 473)
13. Deidre Lynch has argued that tactics of displacement are characteristic of female-authored narratives of the nation in the romantic period (see "Nationalizing Women and Domesticating Fiction: Edmund Burke and the Genres of Englishness," Wordsworth Circle, 25 [1994].45-49)
14. The Wild Irish Girl (London: Pandora, 1986), pp. 9-10; further references to the novel appear in the text
15. Florence Macarthy: An Irish Tale, 4 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1818), III, 44
16. Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1991), p. 17
17. For an analysis of the nineteenth-century trope of the tourist, see James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800-1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993)
18. For two recent readings of this scene, see Vivien Jones, "'The Coquetry of Nature': Politics and the Picturesque in Women's Fiction," in The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape, and Aesthetics since 1770, ed. Stephen Copley and Peter Garside (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 120-44
19. and Joseph W. Lew, "Sidney Owenson and the Fate of Empire," Keats-Shelley Journal, 39 (1990), 39-65
20. On Morgan's doubling of the erotic and the political, see J. Th. Leerssen, "How The Wild Irish Girl Made Ireland Romantic," Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo-American Letters, 18 (1988), 209-27
21. Tom Dunne, "Haunted by History: Irish Romantic Writing 1800-50," in Romanticism in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulás Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), p. 73
22. For Morgan's later heroines, see Ina Ferris, "Writing on the Border: The National Tale, Female Writing, and the Public Sphere," in Reforming Genre in British Romanticism, ed. Tillotama Rajan and Julia Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, forthcoming)
23. For a compatible reading of colonial encounter, see Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992)
24. Maria Edgeworth, Ennui, in Castle Rackrent and Ennui, ed. Marilyn Butler (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 155