Contesting Ireland: Irish Voices Against England in the Eighteenth Century. By Thomas McLoughlin. Four Courts Press. 248pp. £39.95 hardback/£17.50 paperback
The study of Ireland in the 18th century has come a long way since Daniel Corkery published The Hidden Ireland and posited a clear-cut distinction between Irish-Ireland and Anglo-Ireland during that period. Indeed, the ongoing retrieval and re-publication of contemporary material, as well as a renewed critical vigour over the past 20 years or so, has worked to destabilise such rigidly defined ethnic categories.
Thomas McLoughlin's book continues the assault on the simplistic "battle of two civilisations" idea by exploring the extent to which "Irishness"/"Anglo-Irishness" functioned as multivalent categories throughout the 18th century. Politics rather than ethnicity is the key preoccupation of this study, which proposes "to illustrate how diverse Irish writers in English . . . contest England's view of Ireland."
Contesting Ireland assembles an interesting array of texts for consideration, including political pamphlets by William Molyneaux and Jonathan Swift, fiction by Swift and Edgeworth, Charles O'Conor's historical narratives and Wolfe Tone's autobiography. The novelty of this approach is that it enables the author to explore Irish political thought as it manifests itself across a variety of texts, providing an alternative to a systematic historical account or a comprehensive literary analysis. By bringing together such diverse writings usually dispersed over various disciplines, this book provides interesting examples of how "scientific" political discourses are beholden to literary cunning and how "innocent" literary texts perform political work.
McLoughlin's eclectic choice of texts is justified by his observation that the Irish settler community made little headway in producing "a distinctive imaginative literature of their own to capture their experience in this new place". If the Anglo-Irish produced no Fenimore Cooper until the publication of Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent at the end of the century, it may be because a preoccupation with the language of argument, debate and persuasion absorbed the most creative energies and produced the rhetoric of Molyneaux, Burke, Flood and Grattan instead.
Molyneaux's Case of Ireland Being Bound marks the emergence of a distinctive AngloIrish sensibility which is characterised by an ambivalence towards Westminster. Such contradictory feelings of "respect and scorn, of loyalty and resistance" are present also in Swift's Irish pamphlets. Yet, as McLoughlin tantalisingly argues, it is in his portrait of Gulliver's "mental colonisation" and experience of self-hatred in Houyhnhnmland that Swift comes closest to understanding the cultural breakdown caused by colonisation.
Catholic responses to post-1691 Ireland are thin on the ground, yet McLoughlin - who lectures in English at the University of Zimbabwe - manages to unearth some interesting voices, including the testaments of Irish exiles in Bordeaux and the Dissertations of revisionist historian Charles O'Conor, who worked to displace the colonial narrative of Irish cultural barbarism through his scholarship. Anglo-Irish ambivalence surfaces again in the treatment of Burke, who is noteworthy for his concern with national cultural identity, and Maria Edgeworth, whose Castle Rackrent marks an attempt to render an authentic Irish voice, even if it does endorse enlightened protestant hegemony.