Not as Virgil has it: Rewriting the Aeneid in 18th Century Ireland

Abstract

This paper examines an 18 th century Irish language parody of the Aeneid, the Eachtra Ghiolla an Amaráin/Adventures of a Luckless Fellow, by Donncha Rua McNamara, a hedge-schoolmaster in Munster in the south of Ireland. It locates his work within the context of Irish poetic genres, such as the aisling, the Jacobite poetic tradition and his and Ireland's less than ideal economic and political circumstances. It identifies the ways in which McNamara contrasts himself as an ignoble and down-trodden antihero with Aeneas as epic saviour of the Trojans and how he naturalizes and makes palatable to a colonized Irish audience a Latin text written by an imperial power.As to schoolmasters we have too many, and too many mere scholars,

Recent scholarship on classical literature and the eighteenth century

“…There have been a number of important correctives to Tanya Caldwell's claim that Virgil experienced a near‐terminal decline in status across the period (2008) thanks to reminders of the continued relevance to poets of the ‘Virgilian career’ (Potkay, 2014), and the translations of Virgil that saw Dryden's 1697 Works of Virgil as a model to imitate and to avoid (Davis, 2015; Hardie, 2018; Widmer, 2017). Several works have addressed the connections between Virgil and Jacobitism (McElduff, 2011; Calvert, 2017; Horejsi, 2019, pp. 25–53; Pía Coira, 2020).…”

“…Studies of Ossian and the epic tradition form part of a broader change in attitudes regarding the relationship between classicism and Celticism within the British Isles, which is moving away from the generally oppositional or absorptive model that was outlined in earlier studies (Weinbrot, 1993) to one that owes more to Hopkins's 'reception as conversation' model that places greater emphasis on the dialogical. Siobhán McElduff (2011) and M. Pía Coira ( 2020) have discussed the classical presence in Irish-language literature, and Laurie O'Higgins (2017) provides the first major study on access to classical texts in eighteenth-century Ireland via the 'hedge school' system, why such access was so significant to many Irish people from non-elite backgrounds, and how classical material interacted with Irish oral/literary traditions and genres.…”