Ireland, India and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature (review)

Julia Wright's book is one of a number of significant recent contributions to the historiography of Ireland, India, and empire, including Kevin Kenny's edited collection Ireland and the British Empire (2004), Tadhg Foley and Maureen O'Connor's Ireland and India (2006), and Kate O'Malley's historical study Ireland, India and Empire (2008).

Wright's work correctly highlights the lack of attention to the ways "nineteenth-century writers from colonized nations wrote about colonization beyond their own borders" (1), and aims to redress this gap through a wide-ranging examination of "not only Irish writing about Ireland, but also Irish writing about India and British writing about Ireland and India" (2).

This work's strength lies in the diversity of writers represented: not only the near-canonical Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), Thomas Moore, Matthew Lewis, Bram Stoker, and Oscar Wilde but also lesser-known figures such as poets Elizabeth Ryves and Denis Florence MacCarthy, memoirist Charles Hamilton Teeling, and poet and essayist William Hamilton Drummond. Readers familiar with Wright's invaluable online project Bibliography of Nineteenth-Century Irish Literature will be aware of her immense contributions to the retrieval and dissemination of nineteenth-century writing. This book is a valuable addition to such scholarship.

Its chief theoretical underpinning is that of Enlightenment sensibility, developed, in part 1, by close readings of various sentimental or "romance-related" works and, in part 2, by suggestive analyses of various gothic texts. Wright justifies her choice of rubric as follows: "as British and Irish writers addressed the place of Ireland in a growing and increasingly racist British Empire, sensibility proved a useful tool for imagining, and polemically addressing, the complexities of Irish affiliations with both the metropole and with more distant colonies" (18); thus, "insensible empire" proves a working subtitle not only for the introductory chapter but for the work as a whole.

Wright's self-positioning in relation to current colonial and postcolonial theorisations is less comfortable. In the introductory chapter she engages in some detail with Joep Leerssen's argument that Ireland's participation in the nineteenth-century tradition of romantic nationalism renders the postcolonial approach a "misapplication" to Ireland, and she makes the persuasive point that romantic nationalism emerged in Europe in part to resist imperial domination. Wright's own goal is to contribute to what she terms a more complex imperial history "that reaches across, and builds upon, different historical moments, geopolitical situations, imperial ideologies, and discourses of resistance" (6). On the still-vexed question of Ireland's difference and sameness within colonial or postcolonial paradigms, she adopts the somewhat safe position of "both/and"—an understandable but not especially productive theoretical stance in relation to the wider cultural scene.

Each chapter consists of two or three close textual analyses. In the view of this reader, the reasons for the choice of material in chapters 1 and 2 are not fully apparent or persuasive. Chapter 1 sets out to explore the relationship between sensibility and "national feeling" in Ireland around 1800, focusing on Teeling's 1828 and 1832 memoirs of the 1798 uprising; chapter 2 focuses on the engagement with family and education, or "virtue rewarded," in the work of Owenson and Edgeworth. Interesting insights emerge on pedagogy, parent-child relationships, and fostering, but the overall comparison of the two writers is underwhelming; the time has come perhaps to free them from the confinements of this particular critical marriage.

Chapters 3 and 4 are more satisfying and reveal the central achievement of this study. The ethics of conversion, as represented in orientalist texts, forms the subject of chapter 3, with engaging readings of the connections between Moore's Lalla Rookh (1817) and Owenson's The Missionary (1811), considered in stimulating contrast to William Hamilton Drummond's A Learned Indian in Search of Religion (1833), a discourse on the death of Rammohun Roy. Chapter 4, the first of three chapters on the gothic...