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  • The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland
  • Julie M. Dugger
Ina Ferris. The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. vii + 205 pp.

The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland covers territory well beyond that suggested by its title. Ina Ferris traces developments not only in the Irish national tale, but also in other fictional forms—Irish Gothic and "novels of insurgency"—and in non-fiction including travel narratives, memoirs, and political speeches. All of these genres, she argues, played a key role in shaping national subjectivity in a post-Union, pre-Catholic Emancipation Ireland. Beginning with the Act of Union and concluding with the Emancipation agitation of the 1820s, Ferris uses an impressive synthesis of textual analysis, British Romantic and Irish Studies criticism, and literary theory to describe how Irish writers changed the way they defined their nation's position in its "incomplete Union" with Britain.

"To think about Ireland via the question of incomplete Union," Ferris writes, "is … to move into the foreground a sense of language and public discourse as a mobile scene of agitation and agency (rather than impersonal system and containment) and hence to understand a cultural field in terms of friction as much as analogy or homology" (8–9). The national tale, understood from this perspective, aims to act on both its political environment and its generic predecessors, deliberately shifting the assumptions set by the Anglo-Irish travel narrative to establish a destabilizing subjectivity suited to action in a politically destabilized Ireland.

Ferris uses as an introductory example the case of Percy Shelley, who at nineteen came to Ireland bent on reform with a political pamphlet for the poor already composed, wrote a new one on site for the students of Dublin College (changing both his intended audience and his mode [End Page 206] of address), and then rapidly withdrew from Ireland altogether. "What makes the Shelley incident particularly telling," Ferris argues, "is that even so limited an encounter with the subject of his discourse occasioned a new text and a change of genre" (10). She then chronicles a much more sustained change of genre in post-Union writing. The first shift was from travel narratives adopting a masculine subjectivity that presented Ireland as a case to be judged, to national tales that undermined their travelling protagonists by drawing them into the Ireland through which they journeyed. The national tale, by involving its subjects, thus created a new emphasis on "the one who presents the case rather than … the one who determines it" (50). Period models of feminine subjectivity became key in this transformation: as Ferris demonstrates through an extended analysis of the heroines of Lady Morgan, such models initially challenged their colonial context but eventually became challenged by it. By disrupting the "conciliatory" project of the early national tale (101), later national tales and succeeding Irish Gothic novels positioned their narratives as sites of civic upset. They thus prepared the way for the rhetoric of Daniel O'Connell's Catholic Emancipation movement, which shifted Ireland's mode of address, already altered from a "case" to a "claim," one step further to a "demand" for rights (128).

The unnecessarily heavy jargon of The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland can make this argument difficult to follow. (The book's concluding sentence provides an example: "To return this question to the matrix of British Romanticism is thus to bring into sharper view the workings of this often overlooked stratum in cultural formation and to argue, more generally, for the historical agency and productive value of the indistinct and the indeterminate within the discursive negotiations of civic culture in the period" (154).) Further, Ireland's ambiguous post-Union status as "at once a part of the kingdom (a political subject) but not a part of Great Britain (not a national subject)" may seem to be old territory (1), already featured prominently in postcolonial Irish Studies scholarship, to which Ferris openly acknowledges her debt (3).

Ferris ably expands this territory, however, by "shift[ing] the scene of analysis from the imperial stage, which has been garnering most of the attention in the last decade...

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