Forum Introduction: The New Eighteenth-Century Ireland

In the decade following Ian McBride's Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves (2009), the study of what was once "Ascendancy" Ireland has been diversified, expanded, and revitalized. McBride's ambitious work was in many ways the product of two decades of historical revisionism, acting to concretize objections to the ideological restrictions of the New History of Ireland school.¹ His work has helped dislodge orthodox and restrictive narratives about Ireland in the 1700s, replacing the image of Protestant hegemony with a vivid sense of the flux, tension, and incipient instability of this island of co-existing and competing cultures, creeds, and languages. As history "from the outside in" McBride's work evaded the ideological pitfalls of Irish Studies as a relatively immature field and one that had somewhat uncritically adopted the ideology of postcolonialism in the service of nationalist politics.² As Sarah McKibben has noted, eighteenth-century Irish literature displays the pains and the profits of a "mutual transformation of socio-cultural forms," even as that transformation was marked by violence, subjugation, and resistance.³ Due to such historical complexity and complicities, eighteenth-century scholarship has been somewhat marginalized by the state apparatuses (both North and South). Both jurisdictions are currently marking their twentieth-century foundations in the so-called decade of centenaries, providing a funding bonanza for historians and academics. By contrast, both the 1798 rebellion and the rich Georgian built heritage in Ireland is comparatively neglected, partly due to the ideological dissonance of Protestant republicanism and persistent ambivalence about the national status of the so-called Anglo-Irish (a term coined in the 1920s to distinguish between the supposedly "genuine" Catholic, Irish-speaking Irish, and the Protestant, sometimes-Unionist gentry).⁴ Academic research thrives, then, against a backdrop of relative disregard.⁵

Yet, in the context of Brexit's dramatic reshaping of political and intellectual boundaries, eighteenth-century Ireland offers a provocative case study for reassessing the interconnections of nations, literature, and political history. The constitutional flux of the period offers salutary analogues for our own time. As governments increasingly insist on the imperviousness of their borders and value the homogeneity of their citizenry, it behoves academics to recall the contested origins of permeable states. These conceptual and political borders are still shifting, still uneasy. This forum on the new eighteenth-century Ireland at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 2018 sought to examine how recent work on eighteenth-century Ireland reshapes our understanding of the period and place and to reflect upon how new research offers to transform our sense of the cultural and political landscape of the time. Over the past decade, scholarship has re-examined Ireland's canon. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift is a signal example, bringing together bibliographers, intellectual historians, and literary critics to illuminate a multifaceted Irish author attuned to both English and Irish readerships and whose Dublin editions attest to a sophisticated audience with a taste for controversy, typographic inventiveness, and wit. Such revisionary projects are not confined to the behemoths of Irish literature but extend to once-unfashionable figures such as Oliver Goldsmith.

Beyond the familiar figures, however, Irish literature of the period is too often overlooked by scholars outside the island as a kind of special interest category with little perceived relevance to those interested in broader trends in eighteenth-century studies. Indeed, despite English Short Title Catalogue listings, Dublin editions are frequently overlooked by scholars, presuming them to be mere reprints, though many make substantive editorial alterations and revisions. Work is underway to change this situation. Series such as Early Irish Fiction, c. 1680–1820 and The Literature of Early Modern Ireland have made rich and innovative Irish works available to readers in outstanding critical editions. Ian Campbell Ross's edition of History of Jack Connor (1752), by Irish-Huguenot author William Chaigneau, for instance, presents this novel in a revised and accessible form.⁶ Jack Connor's generic playfulness, self-conscious handling of picaresque, and thoroughly engaging narrative make it an ideal text for undergraduate studies of prose fiction in English, not...