|
COPYRIGHT 2004 Boston University
Ina Ferris. The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. 220. $55.00.
In an important new study, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland, Ina Ferris traces the depiction of Ireland through a range of prose genres in the fraught period between the Act of Union (1800) and Catholic Emancipation (1829). Ferris attends not only to the specifics of the internal colony as a problem of representation (in both the political and literary senses of the term), but also contributes to ongoing discussions of the ways in which generic conventions are ideologically implicated in English-language literature of the Romantic period. Addressing English tours of Ireland, the national tale, and "novels of insurgency," Ferris focuses her discussion on the ways in which the myth of historical progress informs the construction of Ireland as a question with no easy answer for imperial Britain--a myth that is, in turn, challenged in Irish narrative prose through various figures of destabilization.
In the introduction, Ferris outlines the complex position of Ireland as an internal colony of Britain during both the emergence of what Paul Magnuson terms "public cultural consciousness" (qtd. 2) and the debates over the Act of Union. Transferring Irish political representation from the Irish Parliament to a block of seats in the British Parliament, Union was deemed a solution to Irish rebellion. But it also, as Ferris reminds us,...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
