The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland

by Ina Ferris

Overview

Ina Ferris examines the way in which the problem of "incomplete union" (generated by the formation of the United Kingdom in 1800) destabilized British public discourse in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Ferris presents a full-length study of the chief genre to emerge out of the political problem of Union: the national tale, an intercultural and mostly female-authored fictional mode that articulated Irish grievances to English readers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521110556
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	05/07/2009
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Romanticism , #51
Pages:	220
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)
Lexile:	1730L (what's this?)

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.

Table 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.

Editorial Reviews

"Richly nuanced [...] Ferris's splendid book effects a substantial shift in how Romanticists might now engage 'the question of Ireland'[...]
Wordsworth Circle

"...elegantly theorized and thought-provoking..."
Studies in Romanticism

"Engaging."
Studies in English Literature

"By combining a sensitive reading of the novels with an unblinking look at the fact of their English readership, Ferris adds significantly to our understanding of the genre."
Modern Philology

"Ferris's study represents an important contribution to scholarship on Ireland and 'the Irish question' in Britain's Romantic period. It is an invaluable resource for literary critics and historians, for Romanticists—and for Canadianists and comparatists, like this reviewer, whose thinking hte literary history of nationalism has been strengthened by Ferris's scholarship on the national tale." - Andrea Cabajsky, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

From the Publisher