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The first full-length study of the national tale, a genre articulating Irish grievances to English readers in the early nineteenth century.
List of contents
Acknowledgments; Introduction. The awkward space of Union; 1. Civic travels: the Irish tour and the new United Kingdom; 2. Public address: the national tale and the pragmatics of sympathy; 3. Female agents: rewriting the national heroine in Morgan's later tales; 4. The shudder of history: Irish Gothic and ruin writing; 5. Agitated bodies: the Emancipation debate and novels of insurgency in the 1820s; Bibliography.
About the author
Ina Ferris is Professor of English at the University of Ottawa. She is the author of The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History and the Waverley Novels (1991) and William Makepeace Thackeray (1983). Her work has also appeared in essay collections and in journals such as Modern Language Quarterly, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Studies in Romanticism and Eighteenth-Century Fiction.
Summary
Ferris examines the way in which the problem of 'incomplete union'generated by the formation of the United Kingdom in 1800 destabilised British public discourse in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and the emergence of the national tale as the main genre to address these issues.
