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  1. Home
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  3. Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790–1870
  • Cited by 36
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
September 2009
Print publication year:
2000
Online ISBN:
9780511484766
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511484766
Subjects:
Literature, Irish Literature, English Literature 1830-1900
Information

Book description

In this book, Mary Jean Corbett explores fictional and non-fictional representations of Ireland's relationship with England throughout the nineteenth century. Through postcolonial and feminist theory, she considers how cross-cultural contact is negotiated through tropes of marriage and family, and demonstrates how familial rhetoric sometimes works to sustain, sometimes to contest the structures of colonial inequality. Analyzing novels by Edgeworth, Owenson, Gaskell, Kingsley, and Trollope, as well as writings by Burke, Carlyle, Engels, Arnold, and Mill, Corbett argues that the colonizing imperative for 'reforming' the Irish in an age of imperial expansion constitutes a largely unrecognized but crucial element in the rhetorical project of English nation-formation. By situating her readings within the varying historical and rhetorical contexts that shape them, she revises the critical orthodoxies surrounding colonial discourse that currently prevail in Irish and English studies, and offers a fresh perspective on important aspects of Victorian culture.

Reviews

"...impressive scholarship helps to make Allegories of Union a significant contribution to recent critical work attentive to how modern post-colonial theory, with its emphasis on "heterogeneity" and "hybridity," can illuminate 'analogous struggles over meaning in the past.'" Victorians Institute Journal

"...a very timely book that brings concerns regarding gender and postcolonialism to bear on the discourse--specifically political commentary and novels--regarding the relationship between Ireland and England from the 1790s to the 1860s...Corbett's book is impressively lucid..." Victorian Studies

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