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  • Imperial Analogues in Early Irish Fiction
  • Daniel Sanjiv Roberts (bio)

This essay reflects on some of the ways in which Irish fiction over the long eighteenth century—from the Williamite settlement to the Union of 1801—was concerned with empire. Colonial metaphors, often drawing on historical and classical parallels in the imaginations of the enlightened Protestant order, came readily to mind during an era that succeeded the plantation of Ireland, and, from the early seventeenth century, witnessed the establishment—and subsequent loss—of the American colonies in the west, followed by the foundation of a burgeoning empire in the east. These major regional and global developments, which crucially involved, in interconnected ways, the growth and protection of British military and maritime powers, the claiming and safeguarding of commercial and trading rights, and the development through migration of settler colonies over newly discovered areas of the world that were coming under—and sometimes resisting—imperial influence, left their mark unsurprisingly on the fictional imagination of Anglophone writers of the period.1 Most famously, such concerns were revealed in Jonathan's Swift's satirical fantasy of other worlds, Gulliver's Travels, or, as first published, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World (1726). This was a work that was clearly indebted to, and parodic of, the immensely popular genre of European travel writing, a mode that, along with other imperial practices, was productive of what Mary Louise Pratt has described as "a Eurocentred form of global … or [End Page 343] 'planetary' consciousness."2 Swift's reputation as the pre-eminent Anglo-Irish writer of the period and the canonical status of his satirical and fictional masterpiece has led his work to be often read somewhat in isolation as a work of monumental and idiosyncratic genius.

My aim is to open up the field to further investigation by reading Gulliver's Travels in relation to other, lesser-known works of fiction in order to suggest a more deep and sustained engagement with imperial themes in Irish literature than has generally been recognized in this period. In particular, I turn to the anonymously published Vertue Rewarded; or, the Irish Princess (1693) and Charles Johnston's The History of Arsaces, Prince of Betlis (1774), works that have appeared in the Early Irish Fiction series published by Dublin's Four Courts Press.3 Integral to this planetary consciousness in Irish literature, I suggest, is the concern, broadly indebted to early modern and Enlightenment modes of thinking, with the distinction between civility and barbarity. This contrast was exemplified at the time by the difference between Europe and its others, the latter denoted especially by the so-called savage peoples of the New World and of Africa as reported to educated readers through the literature of travel. A complicating factor in this mode of Enlightenment thinking, however, is the anomalous place granted to Ireland within it, akin in many ways to the savagery associated with non-European others, though too close to be entirely alien. I analyze how early Irish fiction responds to, complicates, and challenges these unpalatable charges which were still prevalent amongst contemporaries, especially in England. These responses involved the development of analogical and metaphorical modes of fictional representation, registering various forms of Irish self-alignment with empire. Such imperial analogues in fiction, I argue, may be seen as an expression of what has been termed Protestant patriotism: a growing sense of pride coupled with awareness of Ireland's distinctiveness and potentially conflicting interests with Britain's. As we shall see, such patriotism could also veer into anxiety and self-doubt from a recognition of the ultimate precarity of Enlightenment values.

The anonymously published Vertue Rewarded, set in Clonmel during the Williamite campaign, reflects broadly the wider European competition for imperial stakes represented by the settlement of Ireland. While the Williamite wars of 1690–1691 mark a definitive moment in modern Irish history and obviously secured the political framework for English Protestant rule over Ireland in the eighteenth century, it is worth recalling that this famous victory—too often remembered in anachronistically nationalistic and narrowly sectarian terms today—bore larger European and global dimensions during an era in which Britain was rapidly expanding both westwards...

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