Representing the National Landscape in Irish Romanticism by Julia M. Wright (review)

Since Benedict Anderson’s transformational Imagined Communities (1983), literary critics have engaged nationalism as a crucial cultural category, often focusing on the powerful correspondence between nationalism and aesthetics underwritten by Romantic nationalism, as described by J. G. Herder and other eighteenth-century exponents of the environmental foundations of national character. While acknowledging the productivity of studies focused on Romantic nationalism’s cultural effects, Julia Wright’s Representing the National Landscape in Irish Romanticism emphasizes that Irish Romantic writers imagined a broader geopolitical frame for both aesthetics and nationalism.

Wright brings to view this geopolitical dimension of Irish Romanticism by widening the aperture of J. G. A. Pocock’s “four nations” model, which situates Irish Romanticism as reactive to or derivative of British (usually English) Romanticism. Wright thus focuses on Catholics and dissenters writing outside of Dublin and treats more peripherally the Protestant, Dublin-based writers normally aligned with the British tradition. These lesser-known authors, Wright argues, position Ireland not merely relative to Great Britain, but within larger European and transatlantic contexts. The Irish landscape is not aesthetically critical in this global framework because of the Irish people’s affective relation to the land, as Romantic nationalism would have it; instead, the land supports Irish claims to national self-determination with its unique geographical value in an international market. This market value becomes an enticement to imperialist ambitions, underscoring the necessity of Irish sovereignty as a hedge against foreign conquest.

Wright focuses her project further by considering published and out-of-print texts produced after the Seven Years’ War (1754-63) through the early 1840s. Irish writers of this period, Wright shows, commonly use three basic forms to articulate the relation among the land, the people, and governance: Burkean landscape aesthetics, the national tale, and the Gothic. Across six chapters, Wright first recuperates the ways lesser-known authors (like John Leslie, William Drennan, and Alicia Lefanu) used these genres in their work, and then demonstrates how these literary strategies were adopted by authors whose names are now more familiar to us because of their recruitment to British Romanticism (Sydney Owenson, for example). The result is a dynamic view of Ireland’s Romantic-period auto-ethnography as written by authors looking not exclusively to England but outward to Europe and the United States; Ireland emerges on this wider gamut affected—but not defined by—the colonial dispensation.

The astonishing archival labor supporting Wright’s argument yields a number of glittering insights that establish Irish Romanticism as a literary movement unto itself, evolving synchronously with—and, often, independently of—English and Scottish Romanticism. For example, Wright traces in her first chapter the topographical verse origins of the Irish national prose tale: John Leslie’s 1772 poem, Killarney is, Wright shows, an early example of what Robert Tracy has named the “Glorvina solution” (after Sydney Owenson’s heroine in The Wild Irish Girl). In this plotline, an Irishwoman and Englishman marry, becoming an allegory of national union and, Wright clarifies, of the “conciliatory politics in which Ireland is offered up to Britain as a willing subordinate” (p. 44). By locating the origins of the national tale in Irish topographical verse, Wright charts a generic trajectory unique to the Irish canon.

In another significant conclusion about the Irish national tale, Wright explains that, in this genre, “the volk do not represent the nation—the aristocracy does” (p. xxviii). This observation distinguishes Ireland from England absolutely, where—as Linda Colley, Gerald Newman, Stephen Behrendt, Alan Bewell, and others have shown—the aristocracy, especially the Hanoverian royalty, were believed to be not only unrepresentative of a nationalist ethos, but also damaging to it. In a longer view of the nineteenth century, Wright’s work thus situates Yeats as an heir (not an inventor) of a tradition consolidating aristocratic interests and Irish nationalism under the Romantic ideal of the folk. Wright’s study is full of similar revelations, which locate Irish Romanticism as the...