Ireland, India and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature

In this innovative study Julia M. Wright addresses rarely asked questions: how and why does one colonized nation write about another? Wright focuses on the way nineteenth-century Irish writers wrote about India, showing how their own experience of colonial subjection and unfulfilled national aspirations informed their work. Their writings express sympathy with the colonised or oppressed people of India in order to unsettle nineteenth-century imperialist stereotypes, and demonstrate their own opposition to the idea and reality of empire. Drawing on Enlightenment philosophy, studies of nationalism, and postcolonial theory, Wright examines fiction by Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan, gothic tales by Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde, poetry by Thomas Moore and others, as well as a wide array of non-fiction prose. In doing so she opens up new avenues in Irish studies and nineteenth-century literature.

Introduction: Insensible Empire; Part I. National Feeling, Colonial Mimicry, and Sympathetic Resolutions: 1. 'National feeling': the politics of Irish sensibility; 2. Empowering the colonized; or, virtue rewarded; 3. Travellers, converts, and demagogues; Part II. Colonial Gothic and the Circulation of Wealth: 4. On the frontier: imitation and colonial wealth in Edgeworth and Lewis; 5. 'Some neglected children': thwarted colonial genealogies; 6. Stoker and Wilde: all points east; Conclusion; Bibliography.

Julia M. Wright examines how nineteenth-century Irish writers such as Maria Edgeworth, Lady Morgan, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde and Thomas Moore wrote about India, showing how their own experience of colonial subjection informed their work. In doing so she opens up new avenues in Irish studies and nineteenth-century literature.

Julia M. Wright is Professor of English at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.