Julia M. Wright

Blake, nationalism, and the politics of alienation

Despite his reputation as a staunch individualist and repeated attacks on institutions that constrain the individuals imagination, Julia Wright argues that William Blake rarely represents isolation positively and explores his concern with the kind of national community being established.

‘Wel gelun a gud?’: Thomas Sheridan's Brave Irishman and the failure of English

Scholarship on Thomas Sheridans popular farce The Brave Irishman has to date focused on its engagement with the figure of the ‘stage Irishman’, testing the title characters thick accent and Irish idiom against a standard English that rarely appears in the play itself. This essay considers the farce on broader terms, addressing both regional variations in the plays performance and the other idioms of the play, in order to argue that the farce overturns the devaluing of the Irish idiom and instead dramatises the shortcomings of English on terms consistent with Sheridans large body of writing on the English language as spoken in the British Isles.

National Erotics and Political Theory in Morgan’s The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys

Taylor and Francis Ltd GERR041015.sgm 10.108 / 509580410001680589 Europe Romantic Review 50-9585 (pri t)/174 -4657 (online) Original Article 2 04 & Francis Ltd 5 0 00June 2004 JuliaM.Wright Departme t of EnglishWilfrid Lauri r UniversityWaterlooON N2L 3C5Canada jwright@wlu.c . Modern nationalism may have arisen in the late eighteenth century as a populist response to such watershed events as the French Revolution, but its roots lie in Enlightenment political philosophy as well as traditional, more localized, iconographies and representational practices. Because of these tangled and often contradictory roots; nationalism and concomitant ideas of nationhood and nationality were variously expressed and defined. Thus, in her last Irish novel, The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys: A National Tale (1827), Lady Morgan (formerly Sydney Owenson) represents 1790s Ireland as the site of a competition between various forms of nationalism, particularly antiquarian nationalism, which seeks a return to the cultural and political past, and ‘inaugural nationalism,’ which strives to establish a modern state (Wright 941). Morgan, however, not only examines the fraught relationship between Romantic-era Irish nationalist discourse and Ireland’s past, but also explores the ways in which this discourse was complicated by its reliance on two different philosophical frameworks for conceptualizing the place of the individual within the nation: in one, the nation is theorized within liberal political thought as a construct that negotiates rights and obligations for members who consent to participate; in the other, the nation is not an abstraction but a personality, its people the iteration of a generalized ‘national character’ that is shaped by both intraand international relations. Seamus Deane suggestively argues that, in the wake of the 1798 Irish Uprising, Irish literature is

Courting Public Opinion: Handling Informers in the 1790s

inNorthanger Abbey, Jane Austen’s hero protests, after his father is accused of various gothic atrocities, “Could [such crimes] be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing; where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open?” (159). Austen wrote Northanger Abbey in the late 1790s, a period in which such “voluntary spies,” or informers, were essential to government attempts to suppress political dissent throughout the British Isles.1 In Ireland, during the rise of the United Irishmen and other organizations opposed to colonial hegemony, the use of informers was particularly notorious. In 1794, John Philpot Curran, defending a United-man, Dr. William Drennan, from sedition charges, offered an attack on the general credibility of “an informer” (A Full Report 71):

Irish Romanticism: “Whence and What Are Ye?”

“Whence and what are ye?” pitying I inquired Of these poor ghosts, who, tatter’d, tost, and tired With such eternal puffing, scarce could stand On their lean legs while answering my demand. “We once were authors,” thus the Sprite, who led This tag-rag regiment of spectres, said,— “Authors of every sex, male, female, neuter, Who, early smit with love of praise and—pewter, On ————’s shelves first saw the light of day, On ————’s puffs exhaled our lives away,— Like summer wind-mills, doom’d to dusty peace, When the brisk gales, that lent them motion, cease. Ah, little knew we then what ills await Much-lauded scribblers in their after-state ... .” (Thomas Moore, “Imitation of the Inferno of Dante,” 1828)

Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons (review)

more acceptable not only to assume authorial benevolence but also to sub sume oneself emotionally and intellectually in the author’s world view”—that is, to be a sentimental reader. The new model of elite read ing, she suggests, was made possible in part by increased literary “specialization” (as “novel” came to mean something much more cir cumscribed than previously), but old ways of reading died hard: Fielding’s Shamela, as its title suggests, reads Richardson’s story as a sham, a lie that claims truth. Meanwhile Richardson’s champions also used parts of the old hermeneutic by pretending to believe that Pamela was real: another lie meant to be seen through. Sometimes common sense, especially when joined by excellent research, a clear head, and a prose style resolutely devoted to informing rather than impressing, rises to the level of genius. Reading Fictions is in this class, and is required reading for students of both Augustan irony and the early novel.