Mapping Ireland in early fiction.

Ross, Ian Campbell

Mapping Vertue Rewarded (1693) and Sarah Butler's Irish Tales (1716) reveals significant cartographical and narrative distinctions between these and two near-contemporary English fictions, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719). While the latter show the contemporary colonizing movement outwards from England, Vertue Rewarded and Irish Tales reveal trajectories of invasion and incursion, characteristic of historiographical accounts of Ireland, from the eleventh-century Lebor Gabdla Erenn onwards. A broader engagement with pre-Romantic Irish literature, it is argued, may help to address contemporary anxieties about the study of national literature(s), along lines suggested by the current comparatist objectives of the literary cartographer and theorist, Franco Moretti.

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... maps bring to light the internal logic of narrative: the semiotic domain around which a plot coalesces and self-organizes.

(Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900)

For more than a decade, the mapping of prose fiction has been particularly associated with the work of Franco Moretti, beginning with his Atlas of the European Novel (1997), through his edited collection, The Novel (2001-3), Graphs, Maps, and Trees (2005), to his essay 'The Novel: History and Theory', which appeared in New Left Review in August 2008. (1) In comparison to the global ambitions increasingly espoused by Moretti, the aims of the Early Irish Fiction c. 1680-c. 1820 series of critical editions of Irish novels, of which Vertue Rewarded and Irish Tales were the first to be published, are modest but not, I hope, parochial. (2) Though bound up with the study of the Irish novel as part of a national literature, the project is in no way unsympathetic to the expansive uses of cultural geography the comparativist Moretti (re-)articulated in his 2008 essay, where he declared his current aim to be '"to make the literary field longer, larger, and deeper": historically longer, geographically larger, and morphologically deeper than those few classics of nineteenth-century Western European "realism" that have dominated the recent theory of the novel.' (3)

If it is true that modern studies even of eighteenth-century English fiction were, for long, dominated by a concern with realism, especially under the influence of Ian Watt's transformative study, The Rise of the Novel (1957), that situation changed some fifteen to thirty years ago, with the publication of a cluster of works that included Lennard J. Davis's Factual Fictions: the Origin of the English Novel (1983), Michael McKeon's The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (1987), J. Paul Hunter's Before Novels: the Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth Century English Fiction (1990), and Margaret Anne Doody's The True Story of the Novel (1997) which, individually and collectively, drew attention to the generic variety that informs seventeenth and early-eighteenth century fiction in English. None of these works, however, considered Irish (or for that matter Scottish) fiction of the period as revealing distinctive characteristics. Indeed, it was only a quarter of century ago that the notion could be authoritatively advanced that there was nothing distinctive about any English-language writing from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (4) Major works of scholarship, including both The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991-2002) and The Cambridge History of Irish Literature (2006), make such a view untenable today. Irish fiction of the long-eighteenth century, however, has until recently suffered from comparative neglect, to the extent that more than a decade after the publication of Moretti's Atlas, it still seems worthwhile to consider the extent to which an exploration of the work of writers of prose fiction born, educated or living in Ireland from the late-seventeenth to early-nineteenth centuries might help allow us to make the field of fiction historically longer, geographically deeper, and morphologically longer than it may have hitherto appeared.

In certain respects, unrelated to the novels of the seventeenth or long-eighteenth centuries, it is surprising that no comprehensive attempt has been made to map Irish fiction. First, because in the familiar, if now outmoded, history of Irish fiction, the Irish novel begins with a location--Castle Rackrent--instead of an individual: Don Quixote in Spain, the Princesse de Cleves in France, or Robinson Crusoe in England. It is surprising too because so much Romantic fiction foregrounds the search for the 'authentic' Ireland, usually locating it in the west. (5) And it is surprising because the most celebrated of all Irish novels, Ulysses, both represents and uses Dublin in ways that have indeed stimulated many maps and written geographies. Joyce himself famously remarked that he wanted 'to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book', (6) while his father, John Joyce, commented of his son: 'If that fellow was dropped in the middle of the Sahara, he'd sit, be God, and make a map of it'. (7) Subsequently, we have had, in relation to Ulysses, works as varied in form and approach as the hand-drawn map by Vladimir Nabokov, who asserted in a 1969 interview with Vogue magazine that 'instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom's and Stephen's intertwining itineraries clearly traced'. (8) More recently, there have been Jack MacCarthy and Danis Rose's Joyce's Dublin: A Walking Guide to "Ulysses" (1986), Jon Hegglund's 2003 article, 'Ulysses and the rhetoric of cartography', and Philip Fisher's 'Torn Space: James Joyce's Ulysses', this last one of the contributions to the second volume of Franco Moretti's edited collection, The Novel. (9)

In considering Moretti's attempt to explore what he called 'narrative systems of ever increasing width', it is first of all important to remember the self-imposed limits of his earlier work, the Atlas. (10) The full title of the book is Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900, and by focusing exclusively on the nineteenth century, Moretti was able to align the novel with the emergence of nationalism as an ideology and the beginnings of the modern nation state. Opening with a look at the geography of Jane Austen's novels, he offered a map of Jane Austen's Britain that allowed him to see a pattern emerging: a pattern, as he wrote: 'of exclusion, first of all. No Ireland; no Scotland; no Wales; no Cornwall ... only England: a much smaller space than the United Kingdom as a whole'. (11) And, added Moretti, what we find in Austen is 'not even all of England: Lancashire, the North, the industrial revolution--all missing. Instead, we have here the much older England celebrated by the "estate poems" of topographical poetry: hills, parks, country houses ... It's the first instance of what literary geography may tell us: two things at once: what could be in a novel--and what actually is in it'. (12)

Even if we leave aside the elision by which novels are defined by what they contain--here, by what they represent rather than, say, how they represent--Moretti's observations seemed encouraging to anyone looking at the world, and the world of fiction, from Ireland or from Scotland. Moretti quoted a pertinent, and wonderfully funny, passage from Northanger Abbey in which Catherine Morland contrasts the world she knows with the world depicted in Ann Radcliffe's fiction:

   Charming as were all Mrs Radcliffe's works, and charming even as
   were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps
   that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England, was
   to be looked for. Of the Alps and the Pyrenees, with their pine
   forests and their vices, they might be a faithful delineation; and
   Italy, Switzerland, and the south of France, might be as fruitful
   in horrors as they were represented. Catherine dared not doubt
   beyond her own country, and even of that, if hard pressed, would
   have yielded the northern and western extremities ... But in the
   central part of England.... (13)

'The central part of England': Moretti seized on the phrase, arguing that there could be no better title for the map of Austen's novels. But having seen Moretti set up a centre/periphery model, it was more than a little disappointing to find that the periphery--or at least Ireland remains as peripheral to Moretti's atlas as to Catherine Morland. Of the six mentions Ireland received in the Atlas, three were in footnotes-Ireland here is literally reduced to the margins, where it occasionally keeps company with Scotland--and elsewhere appears only as an absence, Moretti only having worked on English circulating libraries, for instance, 'since I have so far been unable to find catalogues from mid nineteenth-century Ireland [or] Scotland'. (14)

In the course of the Atlas, Ireland--as to a lesser extent Scotland tends to come and go. So, recognizing the problem of nomenclature but unable to find an adequate solution, Moretti referred, variously, and often indifferently, to Great Britain, the United Kingdom, the British Isles, and such 'nation-states' as 'England/Britain'. Leaving behind these shadowy geopolitical spaces, Moretti's subsequent work moved outwards to embrace, first, the European novel and then the global novel. By the year 2000, Moretti was already turning his back not just on national literatures but on the European novel in preference for an engagement with "Weltliteratur' (World Literature), (15) engaging, as author or as editor of ambitious volumes of collected essays, with the topics of, among others, the eastern European, Turkish, Arabic, west African, Japanese and Chinese novel. (16) Moretti's call for a new literary history 'without a single direct textual reading' is still more ambitious. (17)

In the light of such global ambitions, is there a point in turning back in on the local? And is there, any longer, a point in concerning ourselves with individual texts? Moretti himself provocatively suggested that reading individual works has become as irrelevant as trying to describe the architecture of a building from a single brick though, perhaps wisely, he did not enquire too closely into what happens to buildings if single bricks, or at least too many of them, and especially those foundational bricks at the bottom of the building, go missing. (18) Here, I want to look at two of the foundational bricks of the house of Irish fiction--that is, two of the earliest Irish prose fictions-in order to suggest both the value of making available largely inaccessible Irish texts and to argue that mapping offers a way of understanding precisely what may differentiate early Irish fiction from contemporary English works: of 'bring[ing] to light the internal logic of narrative: the semiotic domain around which a plot coalesces and self-organizes'. (19)

On first reading, Vertue Rewarded (1693) and Irish Tales (1716)-published just under a quarter of a century apart--are more readily notable for the many differences between them than for apparent similarities. The first novel is anonymous; the other by a named author: Sarah Butler. The author of Vertue Rewarded was almost certainly male; 'Sarah Butler' very likely female, though the name may well be a pseudonym. (20) Vertue Rewarded is remarkable in comparison with any European fiction of the day for its very specific, near-contemporary setting (the novel's action takes place between the final week of July and the end of August 1690), while Irish Tales confronts the reader with an unfamiliar medieval past, melding, by means of an ingenious narrative sleight of hand, two separate episodes from Irish history of the ninth and eleventh centuries. Finally, while Vertue Rewarded proffers a Protestant, Williamite account of the wars in Ireland, that appeared little more than a year after the 1691 Treaty of Limerick, Irish Tales is a stridently Roman Catholic, Jacobite work, provocatively published very shortly after the suppression of the first Jacobite Rebellion of 1715-16.

The differences between Vertue Rewarded and Irish Tales are, in other words, both considerable and immediately apparent. It is the more remarkable, then, that a mapping of these novels brings to light exactly what Moretti claims for literary cartography. The works reveal a shared sense of space (both are characterized by disorientating unfamiliarity), a trajectory (a movement from the outside inwards) and an internal logic of narrative that in both cases sets the Irish novels apart from contemporary English prose fiction.

By its very title, Vertue Rewarded; or, The Irish Princess offered a challenge to the English novel of its own day, since the only other fictions of the last decades of the seventeenth century to include 'Ireland' or 'Irish' in their title are the very differently inflected The Irish Rogue; or, the comical history of the life and actions of Teague O'Divelley, from his birth to the present year, 1690 (London [1690]), and The Wild-Irish Captain, or Villany display'd truly and faithfully related (London, 1692). The positive construction of Ireland suggested by the title, Vertue Rewarded, and the subtitle, The Irish Princess, with its evocation of romance in place of low comedy, is complemented by the novel's geographical and chronological settings. Not only does the entire action of the principal narrative take place within the space of a single month in 1690 but that action is restricted geographically to the small Tipperary town of Clonmel, and the immediately surrounding area.

This romance narrative, concerning the resistance of the young Irishwoman, Marinda, to the attempts of the foreign Prince of S--g to seduce her, is less confined in time and space than it might seem, however, since Vertue Rewarded contains several interpolated stories that implicitly comment on that narrative. (21) Of these, two are especially worthy of note. The first, set in pre-Norman Ireland, concerns a Gaelic Irish princess, Cluaneesha, offering a tale of (Irish) virtue rewarded, comparable to Marinda's. The second and longer tale, told by a native South American woman, an Antisuyan (Antisuyu being the vast area lying to the east of Tahuantinsuyu, the Quechua name for the Inca empire), also suggests, within an analogous context of military conquest, that virtuous conduct in affairs of the heart will find eventual reward. The first interpolated tale is attributed to 'an ancient Irish chronicle' but in fact has no traceable source. (22) No attribution, by contrast, is offered for the second tale--the 'Story of Faniaca'--though this demonstrably draws extensively on a major work of seventeenth--century native and colonial history, the Comentarios reales (1609-17) by the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, in the translation published in 1688, under the title Royal Commentaries, by Sir Paul Rycaut: a translation largely carried out while Rycaut, a commentator on empire of European reputation, was Chief Secretary in Ireland. (23)

Sarah Butler's Irish Tales (1716) moves us forward almost a quarter of a century in terms of publication but backwards in narrated time, setting its amatory fiction in an historically detailed pre-Norman Ireland, in a manner similar to, but much more extensive than, the story of Cluaneesha in Vertue Rewarded. The action of Irish Tales takes place entirely in a medieval Ireland whose history was wholly unfamiliar to English novel readers, while even English historians and most antiquarians would have found little familiar about an Ireland they could have known almost exclusively through such hostile accounts of Ireland as those by Edmund Spenser, Edmund Campion or Meredith Hanmer, or the numerous accounts of a rebellious Ireland that appeared during and immediately after the Williamite wars. (24)

One of the most remarkable features of Irish Tales, in fact, is that in this English-language fiction Ireland is no longer viewed negatively from an English perspective but through the quite different lens of Seathrun Ceitinn's Foras Feasa ar Eireann [Geoffrey Keating, A Basis of Knowledge about Ireland] (completed c. 1634). Though an immensely influential source for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Irish historiography, Foras Feasa circulated only in manuscript versions in Irish, English and Latin in seventeenth-century Ireland and Britain and did not make its way into print until Dermod O'Connor, possibly with the assistance of John Toland, published the work under the title A General History of Ireland in London in 1723. (25)

Like Keating's General History, both Vertue Rewarded and Irish Tales were first published in London, so prompting similar questions. What did English readers know of Ireland, geographically or historically? How did early novel readers imagine the country?

In 1693, of course, Ireland was hardly unknown, even to the most careless reader of fiction, since the country had been, from 1688 to 1691, the principal scene of fighting in the war that followed the flight of James II and the accession of William III. Whether or not such readers might have been able easily to indicate them on a map, in the unlikely event they possessed one, locations like Londonderry, the Boyne, Aughrim, and Limerick would have been familiar by name to anyone who followed the progress of the war in Ireland in newspapers, pamphlets or books. What must still have seemed very strange indeed to late-seventeenth century readers, however, is the fact that Vertue Rewarded's story of Marinda and the Prince of S--g, like the tale of Princess Cluaneesha, is set in the small town of Clonmel, while Irish Tales takes the reader through a landscape still more unfamiliar, both in geographical and historical terms. (26)

Certainly, the first readers of Vertue Rewarded would have found allusion to such notable and already well-known events as the Battle of the Boyne, and an extended and historically accurate account of the first siege of Londonderry, but not all of the historical materials would have been so familiar in themselves, still less in their telling. So, the novel incorporates not only mention of the activity of rapparees, who were in fact active around Clonmel, but also a sympathetic and even admiring account of Patrick Sarsfield's celebrated raid on the Williamite munitions train at Ballyneety, related in terms very different to those of most contemporary English accounts, in which the raid became a massacre of women and children, and Sarsfield a murderer. (27)

More unexpectedly still, the setting of Vertue Rewarded in Clonmel is further contextualized both geographically and historically by a much longer and broader European and, eventually, global perspective. As contemporaries knew well, William III's army was a force composed of many nationalities, including Dutch, English, Danish, French, Italian, and German soldiers. Among the last is the Prince of S--g who, since his estates are not large enough to support him, has joined the many other mercenaries who helped form William's army. As the novel opens, and having fought at the Boyne, the prince is found in command of the troops sent to occupy Clonmel, while the bulk of the army presses westward to the final Jacobite stronghold of Limerick. (28) The prince is accompanied on his arrival in Clonmel by another outsider, Celadon, the English commander of the horse. Other characters in the novel travel from further, sometimes much further, afield. Faniaca escapes from her native city in Antisuyu, after its capture by combined Inca and Spanish forces, escaping, along with her Spanish lover and future husband, Astolfo, down the River Magdalena to the Caribbean. Taken prisoner by Spanish buccaneers, the lovers are transported separately across the Atlantic to Spain.

After a series of misadventures, Astolfo is forced to flee that country, travelling to England where he joins the multinational force that is William of Orange's army, set to embark on its Irish campaign. Like the Prince of S--g, Astolfo sees action at the Boyne, before marching with the regiments charged with laying siege to Limerick. Faniaca, meanwhile, follows her lover from Spain to England, where she embarks for Ireland, as had the Williamite army, from the port of Chester. Eventually, like Astolfo, and indeed almost everyone else in Vertue Rewarded, she too ends up in Clonmel in the summer of 1690 (Fig. 1).

In the interpolated tale of Princess Cluaneesha, readers of Vertue Rewarded still found themselves in Clonmel but were there transported back to an unfamiliar pre-Norman, Gaelic Ireland, in which Clonmel lies within the realm of the king of Munster. It is a yet more unfamiliar Ireland that Sarah Butler offers to the readers of Irish Tales: the Ireland of the ninth to eleventh centuries, where Irish provincial kings form alliances to resist the domination of their country by successive waves of Norse or Danish invaders.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The authors of both novels, however, similarly employ geography to reflect on history: that is they use spatial to suggest temporal change. The pre-Norman Ireland of Irish Tales is, of course, much more extensively delineated than in Vertue Rewarded, and in ways that could only have been quite exceptionally unfamiliar to novel readers of the early-eighteenth century. This was, for instance, an Ireland of not four but five provinces, including Mide (Meath) along with Munster, Connacht, Ulster, and a contracted Leinster. For the most part, the novel's unfamiliar locations are the seats of the provincial kings of Ireland, along with the battlefields, most importantly, Clontarf, that figure crucially in Sarah Butler's account of Irish military resistance to foreign invasion.

The Ireland of the English-language Irish Tales is also predominantly an Irish-speaking country: something that must have caused English readers to trip over names while reading, as the compositor certainly did when setting the book. (29) Butler's Ireland is a country dominated by the Danish tyrant she calls Turgesius (and whom modern historians know as Turges or Thorgist). Turgesius, the author informs readers, had his palace on Lough Ribh. Now, mindful of the fact that no novel reader in eighteenth-century London was likely to have the remotest idea where Lough Ribh (now Lough Ree) might be, Butler places it in a way that mediates between past and present, describing Turgesius's palace as situated 'near that place, where now stands the town of Athlone'. (30)

In line with the historical account offered by Keating's An Foras Feasa, Butler's source, Turgesius meets his end, following his capture by fifteen cross-dressing Irish warriors, by being drowned in 'Laugh-Ainme' (today, Lough Ennell; near Mullingar in Co. Westmeath). The Irish hero of the novel, meanwhile, is Bryan Boraimh, eventual High-King of Ireland. As King of Munster, we are told, he has his stronghold at 'Cean Coradh' in 'Tomond', though Butler provides no English version of the name of the king (i.e. Brian Boru, or B6ruma), of his stronghold (Kincora), nor indicates even the general location for 'Tomond' (i.e. Thomond, or north-east Munster). (31) Similar unfamiliarity is present throughout the novel. So, the decisive battle between the Irish and invading Danes, which results in Ireland regaining its freedom, is fought on Good Friday 1014 at 'Clantarfe', described as being near 'Magnealta'. On this occasion, Irish forces led by Bryan Boraimh, along with his ally Maolseachelvin, defeat the Danes and their ally, Maolmordh, King of Leinster. (32)

Amid this strangeness, however, Sarah Butler was evidently mindful that her readers should not be allowed to forget the relationship between the wholly unfamiliar Ireland of the high middle ages and the modern country, lest her Jacobite political allegory of foreign usurpation and the restoration of rightful kingship should be obscured. So, the relation in Irish Tales of the founding of Ireland's cities by Viking invaders, notes that three Norwegian brothers, Amelanus, Cytaracus, and Ivorus 'erected the three Cities, now call'd Dublin, Waterford, and Limrick', while it was the Danes who, under pretence of founding trading ports, founded and fortified Cork and Wexford (Fig. 2). (33)

If Dublin, Cork and Limerick were familiar enough names to the first readers of Vertue Rewarded and Irish Tales, however, the Irelands of these novels are ones that would have been quite unknown to these readers in general. The case of Irish Tales perhaps needs no further emphasis, but the extent to which Ireland itself seemed exotic to novel readers is well indicated by the context in which Vertue Rewarded was published. In 1692-3, the bookseller Richard Bentley, whom John Dunton dubbed 'Novel Bentley', published a 12-volume collection entitled Modern Novels. And it was there that The Irish Princess was published alongside novels bearing exotic titles that included Queen of Majorca, Queen of Poland, Queen Blanch of Spain, Homais Queen of Tunis, and Princess of Fez. To seventeenth- and early-eighteenth century English readers, of course, 'exotic' was exactly what Ireland was: 'another country, foreign, alien' (OED, A. adj., 1.a).

Vertue Rewarded and Irish Tales are, then, opposed in terms of geographical and chronological setting, political stance, generic identity, and much more, yet united by their representations of exotic locations--Clonmel or Cean Choradh, Antisuyu or Magnealta--quite unfamiliar to English readers at the times of the books' first publication. And different as they are in so many ways, these two early Irish novels share one especially noteworthy cartographical feature that differentiates them entirely from well-known examples of early English fiction of the same period.

Vertue Rewarded was published within five years of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688), which, in certain important respects--the account of European colonialism in south America, the elevation of a non-European character to exemplary status--it brings to the mind of the modern reader. Irish Tales was published just three years before the appearance of Daniel Defoe's The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). A map of Oroonoko or of Robinson Crusoe would--like maps of many other early English fictions--show England as the centre, the remainder of the world as periphery, with Englishmen and women moving out from the centre to conquer and colonize distant parts of the globe. In Oroonoko, the reader is introduced to the new English colony of 'Surinam, in the West Indies' and Coramantien, 'a country of blacks so called'. (34) Robinson Crusoe similarly leaves England and after a failed voyage and subsequent capture by Moorish pirates off the coast of Sallee, in north Africa, makes his way via Guinea in west Africa to Brazil, where he acquires a plantation, before finding himself on the island, off the mouth of the Orinoco river, where he will become monarch of all he surveys (Fig. 3). (35)

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

It would be hard to find an English novel published between 1690 and 1720 where England is seen as the site of invasion or immigration, rather than emigration and conquest. For such movement, one would need to turn to Defoe's poem The True-Born Englishman (1703), a full mapping of which would result in precisely the kind of muddle that would ideally represent Defoe's own satirical purpose.

Vertue Rewarded and Irish Tales, by contrast, are not concerned with the movement of populations out of Ireland to other lands but about the inhabitants of other lands coming into Ireland, whether as raiders or invaders who eventually settled in the country. In Vertue Rewarded, the invaders are the Williamite army, composed of soldiers of many nationalities--a point made quite explicitly in the novel--many of whom would remain in Ireland as a result of the Williamite land settlement. (36) In Irish Tales, the newcomers are those Danes, Norwegians, and Oostmen or Easterlings--Vikings--who invade, conquer and settle in the country from Scandinavia, the Isle of Man or England. And in the interest of her Jacobite politics, Sarah Butler expands that historical narrative, by implication, to include the Norman, Elizabethan, Cromwellian and, finally, Williamite invasions and settlements.

If this emphasis on incursion unites two otherwise dissimilar Irish fictions, however, the notion of the Irish past as being characterized by waves of invasions is familiar enough in Irish history, including Keating's Foras Feasa. Such invasions begin not simply in the twelfth century but from before the Biblical Flood. Pre-Norman (pre-'English') invaders included Cessair, Partholon, Nemed, the Fir Bolgs, the Tuatha De Danann, the Milesians, and the Danes, and this narrative was deeply embedded in Irish historiography, from as early as the time of the writing of the Lebor Gabdla Erenn [Book of Invasions of Ireland] in the eleventh century. (37)

Considered in this way, and especially as represented cartographically, a novel like Vertue Rewarded--imaginatively populated by an Irish gentlewoman, a princely German hero, his English commander of the horse, a Dutch king, an Antisuyan noblewoman, and her Spanish conquistador lover--might be thought to represent a view of Ireland that has a much stronger historiographical basis than anything suggested either by its realistic frame (the Williamite wars), important though that is, or its no less important romance elements (the stories of Marinda, Faniaca and Cluaneesha).

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

Viewed from this perspective, the difference between the two novels lies only--though also crucially--in the political narratives they embody. Drawing on Seathrun Ceitinn's Foras Feasa, Sarah Butler is sympathetic to Geoffrey Keating's legitimization of the Stuarts--he was careful to give an appropriate genealogy to King James I and his son, Charles I, whom he noted both to be descendants of the Milesian Eibhear (son of Mil Espaine) and so to have been of the lineage of Brian Boruma, the royal hero of Irish Tales. (38) Similarly, Butler is sympathetic to Keating's position as one of the Old English (Hibernicized, Roman Catholic settlers of Anglo-Norman descent), since, whoever she may have been, she bears a surname suggesting a shared Old English background. (39) The anonymous author of Vertue Rewarded, by contrast, extends its narrative beyond the victory of Brian Boru at Clontarf, and the implied right to rule of the Stuart kings, to suggest the legitimacy of the Elizabethan, Cromwellian, and Williamite settlements of Ireland.

Taken together the internal logic of the narratives of the novels is both unexpected but consistent. Drawing on Keating, Sarah Butler appears to put a decisive stop to the pattern of continual foreign invasion in the final sentence of her novel: 'Thus did that Warlike and Ancient Kingdom free itself from the Tyranny of its mortal Enemy the Danes'. (40) From her own Jacobite perspective, however, this victory did not represent an end to the invasions of Ireland, still less the final expulsion of the invaders which, after the failure of the 1715-16 Rebellion, still lay in a now uncertain future. Even less predictably, Vertue Rewarded, though published in 1693 and, from internal and external evidence, written very shortly before publication, comes to an end not in 1691, following the Treaty of Limerick and the Flight of the Wild Geese, but in 1690, when the final outcome of the war is unknown, following the lifting of the first siege of Limerick. For all the immediate triumphalism that accompanied the Irish acceptance of defeat at Limerick, the legality of the Revolution of 1688-89 would trouble many Protestants for many years afterwards, leaving the permanence, as well as the legitimacy, of the Williamite land settlement and the restoration of a Protestant establishment in doubt. (41)

While Vertue Rewarded complicates its depiction of Ireland in one way, Irish Tales does so in quite another, insisting that contrary to English accounts of the country, Ireland had, in the past, been not a barbarous country but an exceptionally civilized one:

   so Famous for Breeding, that many from the adjacent Islands, and
   most parts of the Continent of Europe came hither for it.

   Insomuch as P[eter] Walsh says in his Prospect of Ireland, that
   when any were wanting from their own Country, it came to be a
   Proverb, He is gone to Ireland to be bred.

Here, those from outside the country come in to Ireland but, having been civilized, leave again. Butler in fact expands on this alternative narrative, when she recalls the time when Ireland was:

   one of the Principal Nations in Europe for Piety and Learning;
   having formerly been so Holy, that it was term'd The Island of
   Saints, and for Learning so Eminent, as all their Chronicles make
   out, and some others who were not of that Nation, as Bede and
   Camden do avouch for them.

   ...

   And we find in their Chronicles, that there were Four Great
   Universities in Ireland [and] no less than 7000 Scholars at one
   time in one of those Universities, viz. Ardmagh, and that they were
   the Irish in those Days who gave a beginning Abroad, as some
   Writers say, to the Schools of Oxford. But it is most certain they
   did to those of Paris and Pavia, and many other great Colleges of
   Learning in Foregn Parts. (42)

The challenge to the well-rehearsed English view of Ireland as a land of savages, 'mere Irish', could not be clearer.

Since he published his Atlas of the European Novel, Franco Moretti has frequently been explicit about the directions his work has taken, both in its comparatist nature, and in arguing for a quantitative approach to literature. In this latter regard, students of Irish literature or Irish studies more generally are in the debt of Rolf Loeber and Magda Loeber whose A Guide to Irish Fiction, 1650-1900 (2006) has made a quantitative approach to the early Irish novel possible for the first time, so allowing for that encounter between the formal and the quantitative Franco Moretti imagines in 'The Novel: History and Theory'. (43) By revealing or emphasizing the number of Irish novels published before 1830, A Guide to Irish Fiction encourages further quantitative work (i.e. the addition of still more works, a clearer sense of the expanding number of titles within a given period), within a comparatively small field, while prompting readers to consider the relationship between analysis (older forms of engagement with texts) and synthesis: that 'distant reading' Moretti proposes, that would lead to a new and very different literary history. (44)

An essay on just two Irish novels of the late-seventeenth or early-eighteenth centuries, in a special number of Irish University Review entitled 'Irish Fiction, 1660-1830', can scarcely hope to avoid the perception that it has simply situated itself within a well-understood practice of textual studies within the context of a national literature. His own model recognizes the initial need for textual readings, but Moretti is surely wrong to believe that those who engage closely with individual texts are necessarily believers in the canon: i.e. in the notion that only very few texts really matter. (45) The publication of critical editions, like the mapping, of non-canonical texts such as Vertue Rewarded or Irish Tales is intended not simply to enlarge, almost imperceptibly, that 'canonical fraction' of texts studied but to suggest that many, many books, that neither are, nor ever have formed, part of the canon, do matter. So, while the study of early Irish fiction may allow us to test Moretti's notion that the modern novel first arises 'not as an autonomous development but as a compromise between a western formal influence (usually French or English) and local materials' (46) it also, and more importantly, urges on readers the need for an enhanced understanding not only of the European literary system but of the idea of Europe itself which, in becoming more complex, necessarily becomes less monolithic.

The anxiety that currently attaches itself to the study both of national literatures and comparative literature, even (or perhaps particularly) among those who engage in such study most thoughtfully, was suggested by the title of Francoise Meltzer's recent essay, 'What is wrong with national literature departments?' published in The European Review (2009), in which the author writes:

   Traditional literature departments, even with various politically
   conscious additions--women writers, authors of colour, postcolonial
   conditions, linguistic minorities, queer theory assume by their
   very structure a romantic notion of the nation state, of borders
   and of linguistics as a major aspect of national identity and
   canonicity. (47)

before noting that her essay will concern itself with

   the early German Romantics[,] to see how they understood the
   twinning of nation and culture, and how this is baggage that
   Western universities still carry, even as they try to open
   themselves to other cultures (48)

within a context provided by those who, like Said, Bernheimer, Moebius, Reading, Foucault, Spivak and Bauman, have worried about the place of literature departments in the light of globalization, the dominance of European literature departments, and the place of minority discourses. Franco Moretti opened his 'Conjectures on World Literature' with the words 'Nowadays, national literature doesn't mean much: the age of world literature is beginning, and everybody should contribute to hasten its advent', (49) while immediately reminding us that the words are those of Goethe in 1827, and adding for good measure a quotation from Marx and Engels from 1848: 'National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the many national and local literatures, a world literature arises'. (50)

Neither Ireland nor Irish writing makes any significant appearance in the essays by either Meltzer or Moretti but it's arguable that Irish Studies might contribute to the work of both. By quoting Goethe on the insignificance--in 1827--of 'national literature', Moretti anticipates and questions the emphasis that Meltzer places on the idea that departments of national literature continue to owe their existence to 'a romantic notion of the nation state, of borders and of linguistics as a major aspect of national identity and canonicity'. Just as the Early Irish Fiction series seeks further to problematize a conception of the Irish novel that understands it to have begun with Maria Edgeworth and Castle Rackrent, so another approach to the more general problem of national literatures in an age of globalization might be to query that often-repeated identification of national literature with a romantic notion of the nation state. The first theorized account of national literatures, including the apparently peripheral literatures of Ireland and Scotland, considered as literatures distinct from the English literature of England, is an Enlightenment account that can be very precisely dated to the second edition of Carlo Denina's Discorso sopra le vicende di ogni letteratura (1760; 2nd ed. 1763), written in Italian but published in Glasgow. (51) By recognizing that the earliest accounts of national literatures such as those of Scotland and Ireland pre-dated the Romantic age, and engaging again with Enlightenment--i.e. pre-Romantic--understandings of the nation, and by looking more closely at the literatures of the European periphery, we might, as Francoise Meltzer would wish, find helpful ways both of rejecting national literature departments if they become static and avoiding the monolithic representation of Europe she argues is too often set against a much more nuanced presentation of what is not 'first' world. (52)

The three questions posed by Moretti at the beginning of 'The Novel: History and Theory'--'Why are novels in prose; Why are they so often stories of adventures; and, Why was there a European, but not a Chinese rise of the novel in the course of the eighteenth century'--are undoubtedly striking in their determination to extend and deepen the ways in which European literary critics have characteristically interrogated the novel. But issues of centre and periphery--as raised by Moretti when he seized on Catherine Morland's 'central part of England', so drawing attention both to what could be in a novel and what actually is in it--remain as valid for those on the western periphery of the European literary system as for those to the east, or still further afield. Valid too are questions concerning the interaction between the different parts of Great Britain and Ireland, not least in the early modern period, as John Kerrigan has fruitfully shown in Archipelagic English (2008). (53) Only when we have a more detailed and more comprehensive sense of how Irish writing in English begins to map itself, or to be mapped, as a 'national' literature from the late-sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, both in practice and theory--i.e. when we understand that 'national' literatures might be conceived of in ways other than those suggested by the cultural and linguistic maps of German Romanticism--can we turn confidently away from the too-often restrictive concerns of 'Irish literature' or 'Irish writing' in the academy (in which this essay may appear, albeit reluctantly, complicit) in order to engage with Weltliteratur, Moretti's new literary history, and the compelling comparativist questions these engender.

NOTES

(1.) Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel (1997; trans. London: Verso, 1998); 'Conjectures on World Literature', New Left Review 1 (Jan-Feb 2000), 54-68; The Novel, 2 vols (2001-3; trans, and abridg. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Graphs, Maps, Trees (London: Verso, 2005); 'The Novel: History and Theory', New Left Review 52 (July-Aug 2008), 111-24.

(2.) The Early Irish Fiction, c. 1680-c. 1820 series of critical editions of Irish fiction, currently being published by Four Courts Press, Dublin, was assisted by the IRCHSS Small Research Award 2008-10, held by the present writer, along with Dr Aileen Douglas (TCD) and Dr Moyra Haslett (QUB).

(3.) Moretti, The Novel, "Preface', p.x, n. 2; the sentence also forms the starting point of Moretti, 'The Novel: History and Theory', p.111.

(4.) See J.C. Beckett, "Literature in English 1691-1800', in A New History of Ireland, IV: Eighteenth-Century Ireland 1691-1800, ed. by T.W. Moody and W.E. Vaughan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 424-70.

(5.) The geographies of Ireland have been explored in relation to the 'national tale' for instance, in such works as Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: the Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997) and Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

(6.) See Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of "Ulysses" (London: Grayson and Grayson, 1934), p.69.

(7.) Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p.28.

(8.) Allene Talmey, "Vladimir Nabokov Talks about Nabokov", Vogue (Dec 1969), 190-191: http://lib.ru/NABOKOW/Inter14.txt

(9.) Jack MacCarthy and Danis Rose, Joyce's Dublin: A Walking Guide to "'Ulysses" (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1986); Jon Hegglund, 'Ulysses and the rhetoric of cartography', Twentieth Century Literature 49:2 (2003), 164-92; Philip Fisher, 'Tom Space', The Novel, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), II 667-83.

(10.) Moretti, Atlas, p.197.

(11.) Moretti, Atlas, p.13.

(12.) Moretti, Atlas, pp.13-14.

(13.) Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (c. 1798; pub. 1818), quoted from Moretti, Atlas, p.15.

(14.) Moretti, Atlas, p.163.

(15.) See Moretti, 'Conjectures', passim.

(16.) It's hard not to be impressed both by Moretti's ambition and by some of the results of his work, especially since he has acknowledged the problem of the sheer mass of even western European literature: the 'great unread', as he terms it, employing a phrase he attributes to Margaret Cohen, whose The Literary Channeh The Inter-national Invention of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002) examines the transnational literary geography of the English Channel--the zone between England and France--drawing on writers who include Goldsmith and Sydney Owenson, without considering that other channel--St George's Channel--that separates Great Britain from Ireland.

(17.) Moretti, 'Conjectures', p.57.

(18.) 'The Ideas Interview: Franco Moretti', an interview by John Sutherland, The Guardian, 9 January 2006: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/jan/09/highereducation.academicex4oerts For different implications of, and approaches to, quantification in criticism of the novel, see also Moretti, 'The Novel: History and Theory', pp.114 and 121-3.

(19.) Moretti, Atlas, p.4.

(20.) See Sarah Butler, Irish Tales, ed. by Ian Campbell Ross, Aileen Douglas and Anne Markey (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), pp.12-14.

(21.) There are four interpolated stories in Vertue Rewarded: the tale of Cluaneesha, the story of Faniaca, the maid's tale, and the tale of Astolfo, as well as an epistolary section in which the Prince of S--g exchanges letters from Limerick with Marinda in Clonmel; see Vertue Rewarded; or, the Irish Princess, ed. by Ian Campbell Ross and Anne Markey (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), pp.62-4, 72-96, 52-6, 126-30, and 111-22 respectively.

(22.) See Vertue Rewarded, 'Introduction', pp.16-17.

(23.) See Vertue Rewarded, 'Introduction', pp.20-4 and Ian Campbell Ross and Anne Markey, 'From Clonmel to Peru: Barbarism and Civility in Vertue Rewarded; or, The Irish Princess', Irish University Review 38:2 (2008), 179-202.

(24.) [James Ware (ed)], The Historie of Ireland; collected by three learned authors viz Meredith Hanmer Doctor in Divinitie: Edmund Campion sometime Fellow of St John's College in Oxford: and Edmund Spenser Esq (Dublin, 1633); over 500 works on Ireland appeared in England between 1689 and 1693, the vast majority of them hostile.

(25.) Jeoffrey Keating, trans, by Dermo'd [sic] O'Connor, General History of Ireland (London, 1723); Peter Walsh's A Prospect of Ireland (1682) had earlier offered a compressed summary of some of Keating's work. See also Diarmaid O Cathain, "Dermot O'Connor, Translator of Keating', Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an da chultur 2 (1987), 67-87 and Bernadette Cunningham, The World of Geoffrey Keating: History, Myth and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), passim.

(26.) Clonmel featured only marginally in the war of 1688-91 since the Jacobite forces abandoned their original intention of defending the town, leaving a Williamite detachment able to take it unopposed, as related in Vertue Rewarded.

(27.) See, for example, R.W., A Particular Account of Major General Kirk's beating the Irish out of their bullworks and fort, and of bombing the lower town in order to the taking of Limericke (London, 1690), p.2: 'Our Army in general are most desperately enraged against the Irish, for their inhumane and barbarous Murthering of our Waggoners, their Wives and Children, (a Cruelty never known to be acted by the Turks in War)'.

(28.) Vertue Rewarded, pp. 40-41.

(29.) So Irish Tales uses the impossible form 'Maolseachelvin' for Keating's 'Maolsecheluin' or Mael Sechnaill, king of Mide (Meath); see also, Ian Campbell Ross, '"One of the Principal Nations in Europe": The Representation of Ireland in Sarah Butler's Irish Tales', Eighteenth-Century Fiction 7.1 (1994), 1-16 (p.5, n.10).

(30.) Butler, p.43.

(31.) Butler, p.83

(32.) Butler, p.90; confusingly, even for modern Irish readers, Magnealta (Magh nEalta) does not refer to the present-day village of Moynalty in Co. Meath but to a large tract of ground lying between Tallaght, the Howth peninsula and Clontarf.

(33.) Butler, pp.78, 84.

(34.) Aphra Behn, Oroonoko; or, the Royal Slave, in Oroonoko and Other Writings, ed. by Paul Salzman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp.6, 9.

(35.) Daniel Defoe, The Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, ed. by J. Donald Crowley (Oxford: Oxford University" Press, 1972), pp.18-46.

(36.) For a description of the many nationalities of William's army, see, for instance, Vertue Rewarded, p.40.

(37.) Cessair arrived in Ireland with her mainly female relations, before the Biblical Flood, while Partholon arrived in Ireland after the Flood; Nemed's arrival was dated to 30 years after Partholon's people had been wiped out by plague. The Fir Bolg were progeny of Semeon, grandson to Nemed, who had been forced to flee Ireland when the country was taken over by the Fomoire; another grandson of Nemed, Beothach, fathered the people who would become known as the Tuatha De Danann. These last were eventually overthrown by the Milesians, under their king, Mil Espaine (Miles Hispaniae).

(38.) Cunningham, p.126.

(39.) Keating did not attempt to claim a place for the Old English in a Gaelic genealogy but distinguished between those Anglo-Normans antagonistic to Gaelic rights and culture and those who supported and acquired these; see Keating, p.559.

(40.) Butler, p.93.

(41.) For all of the novel's undoubted Williamite sympathies, the dangers besetting the victors, if this latest wave of settlers cannot make common cause with their predecessors, so preventing the kind of splintering represented by the earlier division between the Old and New English in Ireland, are suggested by the contempt felt by at least some of the new English from within the Pale for those who live beyond it: something embodied in the account of the young gentleman from Dublin who considers the 'Breeding which he brought from Dublin, elevated him so far above' even the protestant inhabitants of Clonmel, 'that they did look like our wild Irish to him' (p.54).

(42.) Butler, pp.39-40.

(43.) Moretti, 'The Novel: History and Theory', p.114

(44.) Moretti, 'Conjectures', pp.56-8.

(45.) Moretti, 'Conjectures', p.57.

(46.) Moretti, 'Conjectures', p.58.

(47.) Francoise Meltzer, 'What is Wrong with National Literature Departments?', in Theo D'haen and Iannis Goerlandt (eds.), Literature for Europe? (Amsterdam mad New York: Rodopi, 2009), pp. 43-60 (p.43); the essay appeared in a slightly different form in European Review 17.1 (2009), 161-75.

(48.) Meltzer, p.43.

(49.) Moretti, 'Conjectures', p.54.

(50.) Moretti, 'Conjectures', p.54.

(51.) In the second half of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, Denina was known, throughout Europe, as a political theorist, a linguistician, and as a literary theorist, author of Discorso sopra le vicende della letteratura (Glasgow, 1763), whom Rene Wellek later claimed as the founder of comparative literature; see 'The nature and name of comparative literature', in Discriminations: Further Concepts of Criticism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970), pp.1-36.

(52.) Meltzer, p.57.

(53.) John Kerrigan, Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics, 1603-1707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).