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Nineteenth Century Fiction, Vol. 25-48 (Dec. 1970-June 1994) Vol. 25, No. 3 (Dec. 1970) In the same journal Michael Allen, Poe and the British Magazine Tradition (OUP) is called ‘a prime example of the adequate dissertion that becomes an inadequate book’ - sweeping unsupported generalisations, partial opinion and the omission of those in opposition … . [371] John Killham, The Ideal of Community in the English Novel, 19th-century Fiction, 1979-1977, p.373 [Vol. 31]: quotes Wordsworth: Society is here / A true Community, a genuine frame / Of many into one incorporate’ (‘Home at Grasmere’, ll.614ff.); also, Wordsworth's verdict on London in the same: ‘Where neighbourhood serves to divide / Than to unite’ (ibid.). Remarks of Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (Chatto and Windus 1974), that he ‘announces his theme to be the novel’s concern with ‘knowable community’ and more particularly with the development, noticed first in novels of the late 1840’s [sic], of a larger, abstract society which because it is unknowable is hostile to community.’ [here 334] Further notes that Williams does ot think that Jane Austen’s ‘society’ is ‘community’ at all since ‘he espouses working-class community’ [385] Note that John Polidori of the Diodati Villa circle was the author of the first pre-Dracula story in English with ‘The Vampyre’. [ top ] Bradford A. Booth [fnd. Ed. of 19th Century Fiction], ‘In Search of Sadleir’, prev. issued as Michael Sadleir: Scholar-Collector, in Passages from the Autobiography of a Bibliomaniac by Sadlier (California UP / Lib. 1962), ltd edn. 500; Sadleir’s material also appearing in his XIX Century Fiction (California UP 1951). The Sadleir collection was purchased by UCLA in 1951 after the appearance of Sadleir’s catalogue, the author having indicated that he would cease collecting at that date. Notes that among US libraries, the Parrish Collection at Princeton is ntable for certain major novelists; that at Illinois U is notable for inclusiveness, but nothing compares with the Sadleir collection in condition or completeness, espec. In regard to minor novelists (‘unapproached and unapproachable’) [388]; disposed of his gothic novels when this field threatened to become ‘smart’. Note that Bradford Allen Booth was a Trollopean, and that the journal was orig. devoted to Trollope. [ top ] Vol. 28, No. 1 (June 1973) [ top ] Vol. 34, No. 2 (Sept. 1979) Elaine Showalter [Rutgers] reviews Robert Pattison, The Child Figure in English Literature, and David Grylls, Guardians and Angels Parents and Children in Nineteenth-Century Literature, pp.235-38. Judith Wilt [Boston College], review of Carol Ann Howells, Love, Mystery and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction, and Jack Sullivan, Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood. Wilt writes: ‘In English ghost story … as Jack Sullivan acquaints us with it, the paradoxical freedom of the shorter form and the amateur or cult status of its practitioners seemed to have allowed a greater playfulness or eccentricity of form and idea, a valuable, a truer "agnosticism", he argues, of authorial attitude towards the extrarational.’ [239] This doubleness of the ghostly [viz, the ghostly voices in Jane Eyre where the cry, ‘Jane, Jane1’ is both ghostly and Rochester’s real voice] is what fascinates Jack Sullivan in his extremely interesting treatment of the ghost story. Neither the Freudian nor the Christian explanation of the "archetypal ghost story", Le Fanu’s syly and spooky "Green Tea", will do, he says, for the necessary frisson of a ghost story requires an unmediated eruption of "another" world into the human, and the equally necessary personal apercus of it requires an uncategorised experience of powers, or at least gaps, within the consciousness as well.’\/Thus, Sullivan shows, the cannier practitioners of the "uncanny" manage at once to charge every commonplace object and event … with the potential to serve as doorway for the erupting "other", and to so attenuate information on the possibilities from "outside" that, helplessly, the narrators and the readers are forced inside the spsyche for explanation./This book is chockful of suggestive and well-argued insights: that "if horror and affirmation are difficult to integrate, horror and humor are not". [&c.]; that major modernist writers from Hardy and Henry James to Eliot and Yeats "did not see themselves as slumming when they wrote tales of horror". [ top ] Vol. 36, No. 2 (Sept. 1981) Robert Tracy, review of André Boué, William Carleton: romancier irlandais, 1794-1869 (S (Sie Sorbonne 6; Paris: Publs. De la Sorbonne 1978), xx, 417pp. [thesis of 1973]; R. L. Wollf, William Cartleton: Irish Peasant Novelist, A Preface to his Fiction (Garland 1980), 156pp.; John Cronin, The Anglo-Irish Novel: Vol. I: Nineteenth Century; William Carleton, Valentine McClutchy, the Irish Agent (Garland, 1979), xii, 468pp.; review, pp.214-18. On Castle Rackrent: "With CR (1800) she invented the Big House novel, with its focus on an Ascendancy family and its frequent theme of defining the good landlord by urging the gentry to recognise their duties towards their estates and towards their tenants. Irish writers have been writing that novel ever since, gradually abandoning its didacticism for elegy, eventually to surround the Ascendancy in its decline with something of that twilight aura that earlier writers gave to Ossian and Cuchulain. / The Big House novel admitted the "meere Irish" as servants, agitators, or downtrodden tenantry, as objects of amusement, terror, exploitation, or compassion. Even Thady Quirk, in Castle Rackrent, is presented to us with the slyly ingratiating manner he adopted [sic] towards his employers - Maria Edgeworth never tries to show him with his mask off, though she hints her awareness of this other self. [215] Remarks that Boué’s ‘meticulous research’ reveals how evasive the Autobiography can be. [215] Boué has discovered that Carleton approached Sir Robert Peel as early as 1826 [a year before his encounter with Otway] to offer his services as an adviser on Catholic duplicity and as a propagandist against Catholic Emancipation. He had married a Protestant in 1822 (a date Boué revises from the traditional 1820) and as early as 1819-20 had sought employment as a Protestant schoolmaster. There remains some mystery about the depth of Carleton’s hatred of Catholicism when he approached Peel. We know he fle th had been treated rudely a priest at Lough Derg … but the stages of Carleton’s progress from intended priest to adversary are obscure and will probably remain so. [217] [ top ] Refers to the mésalliance of Hardress Creganand Eily O’Connor, and to the peasants and gentry in Drama in Muslin:] Because in Ireland these two worlds never came together to form a coherent society, the nineteenth-century Irish novels are usually formal failures. The novel in England developed in a complex and stable society and depicted that society, analysing the infinite gradations that money and class created in a time of gradual social change. But in Ireland, social gradations hardly existed. Landlords and tenants were usually separated by race, religion, language, and politics, and seldom recognised any mutual economic interests. The novel form was ill-adapted to this state of affairs. [217] Kevin Sullivan, review of W. J. McCormack, Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland (OUP 1980, pp.244-46. Departs from comparison with monographs by Nelson Browne (1951) and Michael Begnal (1971), which Anglo-Irish: A Review of Research(1976) characterises as in every way reliable and eminently useful, but in reality inaccurate and unreliable; but all is changed … Le Fanu, called ‘Invisible Prince’, obsessed with ‘post-sepulture’ existence; four children; d. 7 Feb.; religious doubt followed death of wife in 1858; quotes McCormack: ‘essentially, the common feature of his experience and of his fictional world is the idea of a society based on non-social assumptions, an experience outwardly social but really isolated and dangerousbly interior.’ [245] McCormack calls Uncle Silas ‘a habitation of symbols’ [245] [ top ] Vol. 37, No. 3, ‘Anthony Trollope' [Special Issue; guest eds., N. John Hall & Donald D. Stone](Dec. 1982) [ top ] Vol. 38, No. 1 (June 1983) Quotes Michael Sadleir, ‘Ireland produced the man; but it was left to England to inspire the novelist … Ireland, having by friendliness, sport, and open air saved Trolope formhimself, came near by her insane absortption in her own wrongs and thwarted hopes to choke the very genius that she had vitalised’ (Trollope: A Commentary, Constable 1927, p.136; here p.1). Cites John Cronin, ‘Anthony Trollope and the Matter of Ireland’, in Tony Bareham ed., Anthony Trollope (London: Vision Press 1980), cp.24ff. Cites Trollope, ‘The O’Conors of Castle Conor, County Mayo’, in Harper’s, May 1860; ‘Father Giles of Ballymoy’, in Argosy (May 1866); collected in Herbert van Thal, Trollope, The Spotted Dog and Other Stories (Pan 1950). Refers to the Land Leaguers, and says ‘the anger is that of George Moore in Parnell and His Island (1887) and Edith Somervile in Naboth’s Vineyard (1891) [3]; further discusses the ‘love that went into the celebration of the institution’ of fox-hunting. [4] [ top ] Edwards on national identities: ‘Yet I wish here to go farther. Trollope, almost alone of all British-born writers on Ireland in the nineteenth century, reminds us of the twentieth-century error which assumes Irish and British separation to have been inevitable, an error gratifying to modern separatist nationalists and British conservative apologists alike. In arguing that Ireland could never be integrated into the United Kingdom, each of these groups has a stake, the Irish separatist to gain legitimacy for the highly novel solution from which he benefited, the British conservative to justify the loss of Ireland on the ground that, since it could never be held, no blame attaches for losing it. Nevertheless, in the nineteenth century Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, and it was possible for an Anthony Trollope, going from Britain to Ireland, or for a Phineas Finn, going from Ireland to Britain, to have a single as well as a dual identity. Being parts of a totality, they saw - or rather Trollope saw and made Finn see - a subordinate separation. They could and did experience both an Irish and a British identity, even as nineteenth-century Scottish writers could find a Scottish and an English identity. But Trollope was more than a mere sojourner in Ireland. He met Conor Cruise O’Brien’s definition that to be an Irish writer is, in the end, to be possessed, obsessed, and in some way to be mauled by Ireland. The Landleaguers becomes our great witness here. It is not, as with Tennyson or Stevenson, a bitter attack on what "those people" are doing:5 it is an attack on what "my people" are doing, and the sense that it is "my" values to which they are doing it. The anger is that of George Moore in Parnell and His Island (1887) or Edith Somerville and Martin Ross in Naboth’s Vineyard (I89I). Even though the warfare carried out by the Irish agrarian rebels on fox hunting seems a very frivolous symbol to our generation as a focal point for that sense of anger, yet the fox hunt existed for all four of them as proof of the humanity, fellowship, courage, and excitement which they proudly saw as Irish. Moore, apparently the least engaged in such things, makes his denunciations of the war against the fox hunt the climax of his narrative. … And the Land Leaguers, in the practice exhibited by their blocking hunts as a protest, and in the theory conveyed by their teachings that the day of the hunt would be over when they finally came into their own, foretold the end of an institution and a society which Trollope adored.’ [3-4] [ top ] Further, The "Black ’47" was not, as bitter Irish commentators would claim, a conscious British crime against Ireland - indeed Sir Robert Peel’s government before it gave way to the laissez-faire Whigs of 1846 did more for famine relief than would have been undertaken by any other government in Europe - but it must have left in many minds the unspoken message of British failure to govern Ireland competently, in mockery of the confidence with which Britain had entered on that task under the Union of 1800.’ [7] Trollope on Fineas Finn: ‘to take him from Ireland … There was nothing to be gained by the peculiarity, and there was an added difficulty in obtaining sympathy and affection for a politician belonging to a nationality whose politics are not respected in England. But in spite of this Phineas succeeded. (Autobiog., ed. Sadleir & Page, p.318; here p.5.) Edwards deems Sadleir’s conception of the first two novels as ‘pamphlet[s] in fictional guise’ to be a a misunderstanding. (Sadleir, op. cit., 1927, p.139; here p.7) Edwards comments, ‘Phineas’s Irishness, for all of Trollope’s remark in the Autbiography that it was unnecessary, seems to me to be essential to the whole business. He is preeminently the beautiful savage, straight from the frontier. AndTrollope, who had read and pondered his James Fennimore Coop er … recognises that in Ireland he had the exaggerations and the verities of the frontier. [21] Gladstone infuriated supporters of the Union in the American civil war by suggesting that it looked as though Jefferson Davis would create a nation. [ top ] Edwards writes in conclusion that Trollope ‘went to the frontier [and] learned his literary trade on the frontier. He discovered that frontier-made goods were not good selling material.’ Further, ‘He began to build his litrary achievement in forms acceptable to England and apparently English. But the tools and perceptions were Irish in the initial instance, and much of the workmanship after his return to england was still based on the rough designs he had initiallyexecuted on Irish soil, with Irish themes, abot Irish characters, and with Irish insights. He had even made his small but impressive contribution to the creation in the Anglo-Irish frontier form of speech. Ultimately, he won sufficient strength to bring in a fronier figure as a means by which his own observations from outside could be sharpened even more [in Phineas Finn.] [41] The paradox remains that he observed England and described it, but while in part his description was true, in part it was an imposition on England of Irish experiences and people, in part a deployment of qualities common to both islands.’ [42; END] Walter Kendrick rev of John Halperin, ed., Trollope Centenary Essays (St Martin’s Press 1982), xv, 191pp., considered ‘lack-lustre]. Contribs. Incl. Janet Egleson Dunleavy, Robert Tracy, Juliet McMaster, Robert M. Polhemus, Arthur Pollard [flatfooted treatment of ‘Trollope’s idea of the Gentleman’]. Only Andrew Wright and R. H. Super are ‘worth saving, while John N. Hall on Trollope the Person is of special interest. (pp.109-11). [ top ] Vol. 38, No. 2 (Sept. 1983) Karen Faulkner, Anthony Trollope’s Apprenticeship, pp.161-88; Faulkner writes: ‘Unlike Edgeworth, he [Trollope] cannot chronicle misery and yet remain outside it, comforted by a romantic view of the basic goodness of the peasant mind and heart; and, unlike Carleton, hecannot lose himself in enthusiastic identification with the people he is describing. His experience and his honesty force him to acknowledge that human naure as degraded as that he describes in The MacDermots can only produce further degradation and misery. … It was necessary for him to seek to be "as true to life" as possible, which or him meant that he must try to understand his characters rom within and pae them in a world as like his own as possible.’ [162]; quotes Thomas Flanagan to the effect that the Irish novelists ‘say Irish experience as being essentially tragic, the one view which the English readers were not prepared to accept’, preferring comic novels of Lever whose ‘dashing dragoons and impoverished fox hunters held genial sway over a mob of feckless rustics’. [Flanagan, 1959, p.39; here 163]; quotes Trollope: The MacDermots is … worth reading by any one who wishes to understand what Irish life was before the potato disease, the famine, and the Encumbered Estates Bill.’ (Autobiography, ed., Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page, OUP 1950; rep. 1980, p.71.) Remarks that ‘[t]he humour is absolutely good natured but it depends on the discrepancy betwen the characters being described and the audience Trollope is writing for. [66] Robert Tracy, review of Lady Morgan, The Wild Irish Girl, 3 vols; O’Donnel: A National Tale, 3 vols; Florence Macarthy: An Irish Tale,4 vols; The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys, 4 vols; Dramatic Scenes from Real Life, 2 vols. Robert Lee Wollf., pp.235-38. [ top ] Vol. 38, No. 3 (Dec. 1983) Allingham ‘always Irish [but] no way national’, though Yeats later changed his mind; W. J. McCormack’s 1980 biography of Le Fanu ‘stresses his Irish preoccupations and finally challenges his repuration as primarily a writer of supernatural thrillers, which are rarely set in Ireland’. [354] Tracy calls the poem a novel in verse; summarises the plot: landlord observes the misery of his tenants, decides to dismiss his harsh bailiff, takes charge, halts evictios, deals fairly with the people, and creates a realm of peace and plenty; on finding a peasant under double burden of eviction and arrested son, he fires the bailiff and burns the list of Ribbonmen; bailiff is assassinated. Quotes: ‘If the Celt be rash and wild’, he is also ‘Quick, changeful, and impulsive, like a child, He looks with somewhat of a childlike trust To those above him, if they’re kind and just; Be tender to his moods, allow a whim, No surly independence lurks in him; Content with little, easy to persuade, The man who knows him speaks and is obey’d. (Chap. II). [ top ] ‘With guardian mountains, rivers, full and free, Home of a brave, rich-brain’d, warm-hearted race, - This Ireland should have een a noble place.’ (Chap. 12.) On Cock and Anchor: young hero dispossessed by Williamite Wars, scorned by heroine’s family; no resolution, and nationalist and Unionist as Le Fanu projects those terms back into the past from his own day, perish alike. The Ascendancy can niether compromise nor even sustain itself - Le Fanu’s warning to hisown contemporaries. Bibl., Purcell Papers,being the 12 pieces written for Dublin University Magazine published there between 1838 to 1840 with another from 1850. Remarks: ‘Allingham and Le Fanu both broke away from the more or less realistic conventions of nineteenth-century Irish fiction to experiment with form, one bythe use of verse, the other by use of unreliable narrators and surrounding events with mystery. Both were aware that the Irish novel could not succeed by using the same techniques as the English novel, and both seem to have realised that the episode and provisional nature of Irish life coud not be accommodated within the centripetal English-novel tradtion in which the story moves towards social integration and unity. Irsh reality did not encourage such integration. "Not men and women in an Irish street / But Catholics and Protestants you meet" (Blackberries, 1884). Kevin Sullivan, review ofW J McCormack, Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland, pp.244-46. [ top ] Vol. 40, No. 1 (June 1985) Writes of the ‘puzzling ambivalence about the treatment of these weddings’ [in Castle Rackrent, Ennui, and The Absentee.] Quotes [John Fitzgibbon] Earl of Clare: ‘Confiscation is their common title, and form their first settlement they have been hemmed in on every side by the old inhabitants of the island, brooding over their discontents in sullen indignation’; further, sought to persuade the House that they ‘never had been, and … never could be, blended or reconciled with the native race.’ [Lecky, A History of Ireland in the 18th c., abridged. By L P Curtis, Chicago UP 1972, p.463.; also quoted employed by Terry Eagleton in Heathcliff; and taken up in another context by Edmund Burke - viz, ‘the old violence’.) Tracy remarks: ‘Thady controls the story by choosing what he wil tell us and how he will tell it. He had conventionally been taken as a naïve narrator whose awe at the Rackrents’ wasteful and reckless behavior is a comic device used to heighten our sense of [their] self-induced tragedy. But Thady is not naïve. He is well aware that the more foolishly the Rackrents behave, the more he and his family will prosper. He is resentful of Lady Murtagh because she keeps track of supplies and expenses … [His] praise of extravagance and scorn of prudence hints at his own prosperity as that of the Rackrents declines, and he deliberately shapes the behaviour of the last Rackrent, Sir Condy, by instilling in him the desire to live up to the family tradition of waste. … /… Jason had become manager of the estate, partly at Thady’s suggestion and partly as a result of his own calculated toadying to Sir Condy. Though Thady disaproves when Jason takes over the estate, their dispute seems to be about tactics: Thady would rather live off the estate and its owners; Jason would rather be owner. In any case, the Rackrents are surrounded by the predatory Quirks, eager to rob them in one way or another. Along with Thady and Jason, there is Judy M’Quirk, "daughter of a sister’s son of mine", Thady tells us (Castle Rackrent, ed. George Watson, p.43), who is Sir Condy’s mistress and who almost becomes Lady rackrent. One way or another, the Irish peasants will take back the land from its Anglo-Irish owners - the mightmare of Anglo-Ireland.’ [4] [ top ] Tracy continues, ‘Maria Edgeworth seems to be grooming Lady Geraldine to be a less flamboyant version of Glorvina before she exiles her from Ennue. If this is so, Edgeworth is not just toying with Lady Morgan’s plot device of intermariage. She is close to addmitting that legal title and fair dealing are not enough to justify an Anglo-Irish landlord’s possession of his estates. He must also make some emotional appeal to the deper traditional loyalties of his peasants [i.e., legitimacy], must become in some way a part of the older tradition. An irrational element must be added to Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s rational recipe. But to the Edgeworths, as Marilyn Butler points out, ‘Irish traditions meant … thesurvival of irrational and ineffcient habits: though they thought that extensive education among all classes was the best remedy for tradition.’ (ME, pp.394-95). To endorse Lady Geraldine’s Irishness by marrying her to the hero would be to accept and endorse Irish tradition and Irish identity. Clearly Maria Edgeworth’s instinct as a novelists, as well as her own awareness of the Ascendancy’s failure to put down roots in Ireland and failure to evoke loyalty from the Irish, impels her toward such an endorsement of Irish tradtion and Irish identity. But at the same time, her acceptance of Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s principles makes her draw back from such an endorsement and, ultimately, deny it. As a novelist, Maria Edgeworth values Irish tradition and Irish strangeness; as an economist she deplores these things and justifies her hero’s success by his hard [9] work, seriousness, his marriage to the legal heir to the Glenthorn estates. But there is a perfunctory air about this resolution.’ (Tracy, pp.9-10.) Tracy goes on to discuss the case of Count O’Halloran, a Catholic aristocrat, in The Absentee, and at greater length, Grace Nugent; Tracy reads the documents of legitimation as establishing that Grace is actually an Englishwoman, dg. Of an English capt Reynolds in the Austrian service; however, the shadow of a wild goose and a Catholic hangs about him (or rather, Tracy misreads the situation in so far as no documents have suggested that he was otherwise.) [13] [ top ] Tracy appears to be arguing that Maria Edgworth she skews the plot that Lady Morgan follows by not permitting a mixed marriage [in Castle Rackrent], but that in this novel [The Absentee] she plays with such a transgression; cites Thomas Reynolds, The United Irishmen’s betrayer, castigated by Curran as ‘a vile informer, the perjurer of a hundred oaths, a wretch whom pride, honour and religion cannot bind.’ (W. J Fitzpatrick, The Sham Squire, Gill 1895, pp.149, 123; Pakenham, Year of Liberty, p. 328); further associates the juxtaposition of the names Nugent and Reynolds with George Nugent Reynolds, 1770-1802, author of ‘The Catholic’s Lamentation’ ("Green were the Fields where my Forefathers dwelt, O") [14] and draws the obvious conclusions about Maria’s sensitivities and sympathies. By advancing and then denying Grace Nugent’s Irish identity, Maria Edgeworth seems at cross purposes with her own intentions … [14] The Absentee represents Maria Edgeworth’s Ymost elaborate development of the Lady Morgan plot, with its potential endorsement of the legitimate rights of the old Irish to their lands despite the legal ownership of the Anglo-Irish; and it also represents her most tortuous refusal to le that plot and its implications fully work themselves out.’ [16] Remarks that Edgworth retreats from the Lady Morgan solution of intermarriage and the consequent acheivement of legitimacy by uniting a legal owner of land with the heires of older and more sentimental rights’ [17] [ top ] Quotes Edmund Curtis, A History of Ireland (1936): ‘the chiefly names [sic] and all survivals of Irish law and customs were to be abolished .. the intention was to establish English landlordism and its dependent tenures.’ [rep. edn.] (Methuen 1950, p.233; here p.19.) Tracy particularly applies this colonial principle to Francis Edgeworth, who received 600 acres at Mostrim, in according with James’s policy of setting Protestants … &c. [quoting Butler, p.13.] Remarks that Maria Edgeworth’s flirtation with the theme of intermarriage indicates her awareness of Lady Morgan’s themes. They seem to have attracted her strongly, yet she could not bring herself to yield to that attraction, deterred perhaps by the implicit reservations abot the position of the Anglo-Irish [19] Further, ‘her bleak sense that this estrangement could be made to vanish by an appeal to mutual interst and mutual fair dealing … &c.’ [19]. Tracy also maeks reference to Cathleen Ni Houlihan, Jacobite aislings, and to Myles Dillon on banais rígi/royal wedding, before concluding: ‘Both writers seemed to grasp intuitively [that f]or the Anglo-Irish to rule [sic], it is not enough to have legal right or British protectionl It is necessary to connect in some way with Irish tradition, to recognise and respect that tradition and the attitudes it embodies, to become part of it.’ [22] Quotes William Trevor [character], ‘history is not finished in this island’. END. [NOTE use of ‘take back’ in regard to Irish land.] [ top ] Vol. 41, No. 1 (June 1986) Jacob Korg review of. George Moore, In Minor Keys: The Uncollected Short Stories of George Moore, ed. David B. Eakin & Helmut E. Gerber [Irish Studies] (Syracuse UP 1985), 229pp. Stories from 1882 to 1927; Borg considers the stories, though in few ways consistent with each other, closer in tone ot Dubliners than the stories of The Untilled Field. (pp.121-24) [ top ] Vol. 47, No. 3 (Dec. 1992)John B. Lamb, Frankenstein and Milton’s Monstrous Myth’, pp.303-319. [ top ] Vol. 48, No. 4 (June 1994) [ top ] Vol. 49, No. 3 (Dec. 1994)Ruth ApRoberts, review of Victoria Glendenning, Anthony Trollope (NY: Knopf. 1993), xxiv, 551pp. [ top ] Vol. 51 No. 3 (Dec. 1996) Ina Ferris, ‘Narrating Cultural Encounter: Lady Morgan and the Irish National Tale’, 287-303. Remarks that As a worldly and impure genre that sets out to do something with words, the national tale makes central to its whole project the often obscured, performative notion of representation itself … so closely identified in our critical thinking with mimesis … that its performative sense has been largely overlooked.’ (ftn. Rf. to Murray Krieger, ed., The Aims of Representation Subject/Text/History, Columbia UP 1987); offers definition: ‘The presentation of something to someone so as to create a certain effect’ [289] Quotes Lady Morgan: ‘national defence … fictitious narrative, founded on national grievances, and borne out by historic fact.’ (Pref. Address, Wild Irish Girl, rev. edn., 1846, p.xxvi.) [290]; further quotes, ‘Born and dwelling in Ireland, amidst my countrymen and their sufferings, I saw and described, I felt and I pleaded; and if a political bias was ultimately taken, it originated in the natural condition of things.’ (Preface to O’Donnel, rev. edn. (Colburn 1835, p.ix.) [290] Remarks, ‘The Wild Irish Girl not only offers a history of Ireland countering the official London-based narrative, but it also sets up an elaborate subtext of footnotes in which a personal, authorial voice criticises, revises, commends, and otherwise enganges a plethora of texts on Ireland written from different points of view (and sometimes in different languages).’ [ top ] Cites Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso 1995); Seamus Deane, ‘Irish National Character 1790-1900’, in Tom Dunne, ed., The Writer as Witnes: Literature as Historical Evidence (Cork UP 1987), cp.103. Cites Claire Connolly, ‘Gender, Nation and Ireland: The Early Novels of Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan’, diss. Univ. of Wales 1995); Deirdre Lynch, ‘Nationalising Women and Domesticating Fiction: Edmund Burke and the Genre of Englishness’, in Wordsworth Circle, 25 [1994], pp.45-49; Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (NY: Routledge 1995). Remarks, ‘[W]hat remains constant in the effect of encounter with this heroine: she disconcerts and confounds the sasumptions and identities of the strangers who come across her in the hinterland. / The key to the Irish national tale inaugurated by Morgan is thus her rewrting of the roamce trope of transformative encounter. Recasting encounter as a breaching of the universal of metropolitan reason by the specificities of body and voice, she allows for an unsettling of imperial identity in colonial space through the attainment of a problematic proximity. [299] Argues that in Edgeworth’s Ennui ‘it is the voice of a native Irishwoman that effects the initial dispacement of the young English hero [Glenthorn]: ‘I did not understand one word she uttered, as she spoke in her native language, but her lamentations went to my heart, for they came from hers. (Marilyn Butler, ed, Ennue, Penguin 1992, p.156; here 300) Further, ‘Through its narratives of encounter the Irish natinal tale sought to place certain forms of metropolitian reason under pressure and loosen their configuration. This does not mean, it should be stressed, that the genre repudiates the rational.’ [302]; calls Morgan and Edgeworth the ‘main practitioners’, but instances Maturin, The Milesian Chief. Quotes [Michel] Lyotard, ‘The only way that networks of uncertain and ephemeral stories can gnaw away at the great institutional narrative apparatuses is by incresing the number of skirmishes that take place on the sidelines.’ [‘Lessons in Paganism’, in Andrew Benjamin, ed., The Lyotard [Reader], Oxford Blackwell 1989, p.132; here 303] [ top ] [to be continued] [ top ] |
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