Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter One Public affections and familial politics: Burke, Edgeworth, and Ireland in the 1790s
- Chapter Two Allegories of prescription: engendering Union in Owenson and Edgeworth
- Chapter Three Troubling others: representing the immigrant Irish in urban England around mid-century
- Chapter Four Plotting colonial authority: Trollope's Ireland, 1845–1860
- Chapter Five England's opportunity, England's character: Arnold, Mill, and the Union in the 1860s
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter One Public affections and familial politics: Burke, Edgeworth, and Ireland in the 1790s
- Chapter Two Allegories of prescription: engendering Union in Owenson and Edgeworth
- Chapter Three Troubling others: representing the immigrant Irish in urban England around mid-century
- Chapter Four Plotting colonial authority: Trollope's Ireland, 1845–1860
- Chapter Five England's opportunity, England's character: Arnold, Mill, and the Union in the 1860s
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In Seamus Heaney's allegorical lyric, “Act of Union” (1975), the coupling of England and Ireland issues in the conception of “an obstinate fifth column,” “the heaving province” of Ulster. Identifying the masculine position with English imperial power, the poem links the colonized Irish land with the feminine, carrying a fetal body that will never be born into separateness; even as it marks the geopolitical site “where our past has grown” (8), Ulster is itself a product of the past that has survived into the present, cleaving to the mother from whom it cannot be divided. With a heart that throbs like “a wardrum / Mustering force”(21–22) and “ignorant little fists” (23) that “Beat at your borders” (24), this angry child of Union punishes its mother from within and threatens its father, too, “across the water” (25). The “legacy” (13) of force and violence, the poem suggests, is more of the same: the crossing of two cultures under conditions of imperial masculine dominance and colonized feminine subordination produce only a bitter fruit, with Union's offspring – both a part of and apart from its parents – signifying Union's enduring brutality.
Now, more than thirty years after the renewal of “the troubles,” it may be difficult to read the “legacy” of the Act of Union in any other way.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790–1870Politics, History, and the Family from Edgeworth to Arnold, pp. 1 - 20Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000