Anachronistic Aesthetics: Maria Edgeworth and the "Uses" of History

Scholars often understand Maria Edgeworth as a belated Enlightenment writer in a Romantic age because she seeks to organize both her fiction and the history it represents so that they can be put to use. In this article, however, I argue that Maria Edgeworth's Irish writing legitimates lived relationships between past and present that her politics wished to eradicate. Although she attempts to periodize within her fiction to shape a useful history—separating past and present in order to bring about an imagined future—her anachronistic aesthetics unsettle her historical periods and show the political value of discordance, contingency, and historical misuse. Focusing especially on An Essay on Irish Bulls and Castle Rackrent, I consider how Edgeworth's anachronisms imagine political possibilities that do not simply support either union with England or Irish nationalism. The heterogeneity created by portable aesthetic forms—whether literary language that transcends its historical context or forms of metalepsis that propel readers forward and backward in time—foster transhistorical relationships that expand our understanding of the present and imagine a more open future.