Introduction.
Douglas, Aileen ; Haslett, Moyra ; Ross, Ian Campbell 等
From the picaresque hero of Richard Head's English Rogue,
venturing beyond the Pale in 1665, to Charles Johnstone's satiric
balloonist, rising into the sky above Calcutta in 1785; from the waves
of Danish invaders who cut a swathe through Sarah Butler's Irish
Tales (1716), to the rebel leader of The Irish Emigrant (1817) making a
new life in America; from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver, destroyed by
his forced exile from the land of the talking horses (1726), to Sydney
Owenson's Horatio, unexpectedly finding love in his Irish
banishment (1806)--the movements within the fictions considered in this
volume are indisputably varied, both in geographic and generic terms.
Whether, and to what extent, such movements surprise readers of
this special issue depends considerably on how these understand Irish
fiction 1660-1830 to be constituted. When Rolf Loeber and Magda Loeber
published their pioneering 1672 page A Guide to Irish Fiction in 2006,
they indicated that the work of such a guide, no matter how capacious,
could never be said to be concluded, and they gestured towards the
'beyond': the unexplored areas and unanswered questions that
remained. As their contribution to this volume shows, 'beyond'
is a moving border and already they can offer 'new findings',
an addendum to the Guide for the period between 1674 and 1830. Placed at
the boundary of this collection, their addendum pushes out the
realisation that, in a very important sense, fictions published over two
hundred years ago can still be 'new', and that discoveries can
be made.
The Loebers' guide shapes the field of Irish fiction in a
fundamental way simply by alerting readers to what is there, to what
might be encountered. The question of how it is we come to read what we
read is further developed by essays in this volume detailing the
heterogeneous material existences of the texts they discuss. Only a very
few of Mary Tighe's contemporaries read her novel
'Selena', because, for reasons explored by Averill Buchanan,
that novel was never published. Today, her manuscript in the National
Library of Ireland is accessible to us, as it was not to Tighe's
contemporaries. In marked contrast, anyone with the price of a newspaper
could read the late fictions of Charles Johnstone when the author
published them in Calcutta; but, as the pieces were published
pseudonymously, their first readers would not have been able to identify
the author, nor known of his substantial reputation in Ireland and
England as a novelist. Until recently re-discovered by Daniel Sanjiv
Roberts in India, the pieces were unknown to students of Irish fiction.
The precariousness of print, the arbitrary aspect of textual survival,
is the hinterland out of which emerges Toby Barnard's discussion of
Strolabella, a fiction published in Cork in 1740, now known to exist
only in a single copy. And, even where a fiction has been known and
discussed over the centuries, fundamental issues may still remain to be
decided, as David Berman and Ian Campbell Ross remind us in their note
on George Berkeley and the authorship of the popular and much reprinted
The Memoirs of Signor Gaudentio di Lucca (1737).
The novel was new in the later-seventeenth century, and the genre
did not gain complete acceptance until the later part of the eighteenth.
Arranged according to an overlapping chronological order, the essays
presented here, and their juxtaposition, indicate the importance of
generic innovation. Deana Rankin, in her essay, shows how the Irish-born
Richard Head unites a new location for fiction--Ireland outside the
Pale--with rogue literature's challenge to the conventional
representations of romance. Considering a range of fiction from the
mid-eighteenth century, Moyra Haslett makes the double argument that, in
the wake of the popular successes of Richardson and Fielding, imitation
of certain features, such as addresses to the reader, could make the act
of copying both conventional and experimental; but she nonetheless finds
experimentalism, seen as a combination of textual playfulness and
discursive range, as being characteristic of Irish fiction of the
period, in particular of the work of Thomas Amory. The establishment of
the novel as a form made available to late-eighteenth and
early-nineteenth-century writers new opportunities for self-conscious
writing. This aspect of Irish fiction has been under-remarked, Aileen
Douglas contends, and she argues that the metafictional commentary and
intertextuality of several works by women at the period, particularly in
relation to the romance plot, complicate the fictional representation of
marriage as an allegory for political union.
The essays here combine to demonstrate the importance of experiment
and innovation in Irish fiction, but the critical constitution of both
these terms comes under scrutiny in Shaun Regan's exploration of
the generically uncertain and variously located writings of Richard
Griffith in the years between 1757 and 1772. In a reverse critical
procedure, several essays find in Irish writing a perspective from which
to modify broad generic understandings, and literary histories,
apparently unmarked by national considerations. So, for instance,
Christina Morin uses the forgotten fictions of eighteenth-century Irish
gothic, to challenge the history of that literary mode. Meanwhile, Anne
Markey finds in fictions written for young readers material, much of it
previously unnoted, that urges examination not only of how we understand
writing for children but also, more generally, Irish writing.
The account of Irish fiction this collection renders is one in
which the emergence of Ireland as a fictional subject is implicated in
considerations of genre, and inseparable from the shaping forces of
literary history. This is especially marked in the contrasting essays in
the volume most overtly concerned with politics. James Ward, in his
discussion of the most celebrated of all eighteenth-century Irish
fictions, Gulliver's Travels, sees in Swift's assertion of the
natural body a challenge to the delusive fictions of the modern,
especially political, state. Jim Shanahan, meanwhile, shows how the
challenge of representing in fiction the political trauma of the 1798
rebellion drove novelists to innovation.
In his essay on mapping Ireland in early fiction, Ian Campbell Ross
acknowledges the theoretical impulse that would abandon national
literatures as too limited, and strive instead for the perspective of
'world literature', but he also points to how works of the
earlier period, both imaginative and critical, can loosen the
constrictions effected by Romantic literary theory on the idea of the
national. As we cannot really move on until we know where we are, the
essays gathered here seek to extend the place fiction of the earlier
period might occupy in Irish studies, and, by so doing, to modify how
Irish studies in turn may be understood and practiced.