The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland [Hardcover]

The first full-length study of the national tale, a genre articulating Irish grievances to English readers in the early nineteenth century.Ina 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. Ferris offers the first 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.Ina 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. Ferris offers the first 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.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.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. Richly nuanced [...] Ferris's splendid book effects a substantial shift in how RomlÓ+