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.