Representing the National Landscape in Irish Romanticism

Introduction

ix Introduction In her sun, in her soil, in her station, thrice blest, With back turn’d to Britain, her face to the West. —william drennan, “Erin” (written 1795) The land has long been central to articulations of Irish nationality, from diasporic phrases such as “the auld sod” to myriad representations of rural Irishness and from various contested demarcations of territory, such as “beyond the pale,” connoting Irish-ruled land beyond English occupation, to the Land Wars. But what of “the emerald isle”? I start here with the source of that popular phrase: William Drennan’s song “Erin,” written in the mid-1790s and published in the United Irishmen songbook Paddy’s Resource. In the epigraph for this introduction, Drennan defines Ireland geographically: in terms of agricultural production (“sun” and “soil”), trade routes (“station”), and its proximity to the emerging postcolonial United States (“her face to the West”). Similarly, in the opening verse, Drennan invokes the biblical language of Genesis but does so not to represent the land as an affective object (“the auld sod”), the site of authentic Irishness, or even as governed or owned territory, but in terms of its value: When Erin first rose from the dark swelling flood, God bless’d the green island. He saw it was good: The Emerald of Europe, it sparkled, it shone, In the ring of the world the most precious stone!1 He emphasizes this view still further in a note he added to the 1815 edition of the poem, twenty years after the song was written: claiming x • Introduction credit for coining the phrase “emerald isle,” which appears later in the poem, Drennan writes that the epithet is “descriptive of [Ireland’s] prime natural beauty, and its inestimable value.”2 While many scholars have noted the close connection between Irish national identity and the land in Irish literature,3 Drennan’s poem suggests a nationalist discourse that is based not on cultural identity, but on general notions of economic viability as the basis for sovereignty: the epithet “the emerald isle” has come to invoke images of verdant green, but in Drennan’s poem and note it is an economic image key to claims for sovereignty. Pedro I of Brazil, in an 1822 letter to the London Times, draws on the same philosophical framework as Drennan in arguing for his country’s independence: “Such a state of things loudly called for a prompt reform of the Government—a reform fully authorized by . . . the violated rights of a country . . . which nature has peculiarly favoured by its geographical and centrical position in the midst of the globe, by its vast ports and maritime stations, and by the natural riches of its soil.”4 Ireland’s location, natural resources, and aesthetic value similarly constitute the ground of Ireland’s claim to national independence for Drennan and many of his contemporaries. The land is neither insular nor affective, but nationally significant precisely because of the leading edge of what we now term globalization , including trade routes, production of goods for trade, and tourism. In this context, Ireland is necessarily understood in terms of its relationship to other nations—it is “the Emerald of Europe,” on the edge of the transatlantic and part of “the ring of the world.” It is this concertedly international Ireland that is the focus of this study. The “Amazing Map”: Ireland in International Perspective Taking its cues from such representations of the land, this study therefore begins not with the question “what does the land mean to the nation?” but rather “what does the nation mean by ‘land’?” It presses this question in part to break apart the rigid framework of a romantic nationalism, rooted in the eighteenth-century work of J. G. Herder and related thinkers, in which the people are bound Introduction • xi to the land as an article of national faith. The emphasis in Irish history on reclaiming the land—from early colonization to the Land Wars and the Easter Rising—and on exile has led inevitably to an emphasis in Irish studies on the force of romantic nationalism in the establishment of the “folk” as the core of the nation’s true identity: the land is “rural,” and the people are fundamentally attached to it. In their introduction to the recent volume Land and Landscape in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, Úna Ní Bhroiméil and Glenn Hooper suggest that the essays in the...