The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland

Abstract

In The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland, Ina Ferris examines the way in which the problem of "incomplete union" generated by the formation of the United Kingdom in  destabilized British public discourse in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Ferris offers the first full-length study of the main 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. Ferris draws on current theory and archival research to show how the national tale crucially intersected with other public genres such as travel narratives, critical reviews, and political discourse. In this fascinating study, Ferris shows how the national tales of Morgan, Edgeworth, Maturin, and the Banim brothers dislodged key British assumptions and foundational narratives of history, family, and gender in the period.   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 () and William Makepeace Thackeray (). 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.

Edgeworth, Owenson, and the Masculine Border

“…Ferris locates Edgeworth's and Owenson's novels as performances within a shifting sphere of British public discourse 10 . The implied audience for these particular novels is quite clearly a British public formed of Irish ascendency landlords and general English readers.…”