“The length, breadth, and depth, of the wound”: Irish Historical Violence and Ennui’s Amnesiac Aesthetics

This article argues that Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui provides a significant test case for how political antagonism can be transmuted into aesthetic solutions precisely through literary form--through the transformation of potential tragedy into comedy and romance as the technology by which the displacement, and indeed the erasure, of historical memory and ethical accountability to the past is accomplished. Not only does the case of Ennui, that is, tell us something about Edgeworth and Ireland, but it also provides a model for the way that novelistic form at the turn of the nineteenth century could encounter and manage the challenge of historical violence.