Amy Prendergast, <i>Mere Bagatelles: Women’s Diaries from Ireland, 1760-1810 </i>

Forum Introduction:The New Eighteenth-Century Ireland Rebecca Anne Barr (bio) In the decade following Ian McBride's Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves (2009), the study of what was once "Ascendancy" Ireland has been diversified, expanded, and revitalized. McBride's ambitious work was in many ways the product of two decades of historical revisionism, acting to concretize objections to the ideological restrictions of the New History of Ireland school.1 His work has helped dislodge orthodox and restrictive narratives about Ireland in the 1700s, replacing the image of Protestant hegemony with a vivid sense of the flux, tension, and incipient instability of this island of co-existing and competing cultures, creeds, and languages. As history "from the outside in" McBride's work evaded the ideological pitfalls of Irish Studies as a relatively immature field and one that had somewhat uncritically adopted the ideology of postcolonialism in the service of nationalist politics.2 As Sarah McKibben has noted, eighteenth-century Irish literature displays the pains and the profits of a "mutual transformation of socio-cultural forms," even as that transformation was marked by violence, subjugation, and resistance.3 Due to such historical complexity and complicities, eighteenth-century scholarship has been somewhat marginalized by the state apparatuses (both North and South). Both jurisdictions are currently marking their twentieth-century foundations in the so-called decade of centenaries, providing a funding bonanza for historians and academics. By contrast, both the 1798 rebellion and the rich [End Page 331] Georgian built heritage in Ireland is comparatively neglected, partly due to the ideological dissonance of Protestant republicanism and persistent ambivalence about the national status of the so-called Anglo-Irish (a term coined in the 1920s to distinguish between the supposedly "genuine" Catholic, Irish-speaking Irish, and the Protestant, sometimes-Unionist gentry).4 Academic research thrives, then, against a backdrop of relative disregard.5 Yet, in the context of Brexit's dramatic reshaping of political and intellectual boundaries, eighteenth-century Ireland offers a provocative case study for reassessing the interconnections of nations, literature, and political history. The constitutional flux of the period offers salutary analogues for our own time. As governments increasingly insist on the imperviousness of their borders and value the homogeneity of their citizenry, it behoves academics to recall the contested origins of permeable states. These conceptual and political borders are still shifting, still uneasy. This forum on the new eighteenth-century Ireland at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 2018 sought to examine how recent work on eighteenth-century Ireland reshapes our understanding of the period and place and to reflect upon how new research offers to transform our sense of the cultural and political landscape of the time. Over the past decade, scholarship has re-examined Ireland's canon. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift is a signal example, bringing together bibliographers, intellectual historians, and literary critics to illuminate a multifaceted Irish author attuned to both English and Irish readerships and whose Dublin editions attest to a sophisticated audience with a taste for controversy, typographic inventiveness, and wit. Such revisionary projects are not confined to the behemoths of Irish literature but extend to once-unfashionable figures such as Oliver Goldsmith. Beyond the familiar figures, however, Irish literature of the period is too often overlooked by scholars outside the island as a kind of special interest category with little perceived relevance to those interested in broader trends in eighteenth-century studies. Indeed, despite English Short Title Catalogue listings, Dublin editions are frequently overlooked by scholars, presuming them to be mere reprints, though many make substantive editorial alterations and revisions. Work is underway to change this situation. Series such as Early Irish Fiction, c. 1680–1820 and The Literature of Early Modern Ireland have made rich and innovative Irish works available to readers in outstanding critical editions. Ian Campbell Ross's edition of History of Jack Connor (1752), by Irish-Huguenot author William Chaigneau, for instance, presents this novel in a revised and accessible form.6 Jack Connor's generic playfulness, self-conscious handling of picaresque, and thoroughly engaging narrative make it an ideal text for undergraduate studies of prose fiction in [End Page 332] English, not...

Book Reviews placed love for the unavailable d'Hermenches, the "heroine" is neither seduced nor corrupted by her libertine correspondent. To the contrary, she, and not he, controls the exchange and her destiny . Through her dialogue with d'Hermenches, she constructs and refines an ever-stronger identity , confident of her judgment, indeed, so secure in her knowledge of her self, her passions and needs that she can discuss her sexuality frankly and assess realistically that marriage presents the only means to fulfill it. While Belle's choices are undoubtedly limited by social and gender constraints , the correspondents' discussion of d'Hermenches's military career options and the difficult decisions he must make to further his ambitions show mat men's lives were equally restricted by social, political, and financial concerns. As their correspondence leads to a deeper knowledge of one another as well as of themselves, Belle's letters also comprise an intimate journal of daily and family life, revealing the workings of a close-knit aristocratic family as it deals with the minutiae of the quotidian as well as the inevitable traumatic losses of intimates. It's in the refined descriptions of such events and the nuanced analyses of her situation that Belle's gifts as an observer and writer shine through. Unbeknownst to her, the correspondence swerves from its original purpose and anticipates her subsequent literary works. Janie Vanpee Smith College Jean-Marc Moura. Littératures francophones et théorie postcoloniale. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999. Pp. 174. This study of the literatures and theories that have emerged from British and French colonialisms looks beyond purported distinctions in colonial methods of rule to the common ground of writers and theorists working in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Moura's book takes on long-standing boundaries between postcolonial theory and francophonie, boundaries only recently breached in the work of French theorists. In so doing, it sets out less to include new works within pre-established categories than to reconsider literary Eurocentrism: "Une critique de l'europeocentrisme littéraire ne peut simplement proposer de remplacer un ensemble de textes par un autre ensemble de textes..." (149). By thus re-evaluating the analytic criteria set up by postcolonial theory, this expansive study strives to analyze francophone texts in a consistently postcolonial manner. In the introduction, Moura defines "francophonie" as "une diversité géographique pluriculturelle organisée nar rapport à un fait linguistique" (2), and cautions against employing the term to designate a commonality of issues in the work of all francophone writers. He severs the term postcolonial from any linguistic particularity, employing it as "un concept analytique renvoyant aux littératures naissant dans un contexte marqué par la colonisation européenne" (4). Following this, the first chapter compares the development of francophone literature with that of lusophone and hispanophone as well as anglophone literatures. Moura concludes that the revitalization of French language literature hinges upon the detachment of the French language from its "aura of exclusivity" and colonialist past. This can only be accomplished, he argues, by discarding both the "formal separation of discursive registers" that mark the language as well as its Gallocentrism (20). Thus acknowledging his purpose of revitalizing the study of French language literature, Moura insists on a dismantling of notions of center and periphery. Chapter two proceeds by emphasizing the ideological weight with which the French language inevitably becomes invested in varying colonial/postcolonial circumstances, and distinguishes between the colonial histories of the regions that produce francophone literature. Moura elaborates critical orientations specific to the study of francophone postcolonial literature by modifying the categories of a text on which his study somewhat overly relies, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin's The Empire Writes Back. In chapters three and four, he brings together examples from a variety of historical periods and geographical regions (notably Quebec, Vol. XL, No. 4 101 L'Esprit Créateur Haiti and sub-Saharan Africa). This section employs historical and sociological criteria to consider how francophone texts produced in colonial contexts may or may not be deemed postcolonial in nature, examining various francophone writers' attitudes vis-à -vis French language, literature and culture, and contesting periodization according to the fact of independence. Moura stresses...

I have no party in this business, my dear Miss Palmer, but among a set of people, who have none of your Lilies and Roses in their face; but who are the images of the Great Pattern as well as you and I. I know what I am doing; whether the white people like it or not. Edmund Burke to Mary Palmer 19 January 1786 (1) ALTHOUGH Edmund Burke (1729-97) is renowned for his ideological charge against the French Revolution in Reflections on the Revolution in France, he wanted most to be remembered for his speeches on behalf of India against the corrupt regime of the East India Company. Collecting his own notes and printed accounts to prepare for the publication of these orations, he wrote that they were to be his monument. (2) In Burke's lifetime, and even today, the Indian speeches are regarded as too violent, too vitriolic, too emotional, too personal. They exist as a strange phenomenon in the landscape of eighteenth-century British oratory, and this article argues that they are best understood within the context of the Gaelic poetry of Munster, the region of Ireland in which Burke was raised and educated. (3) NAGLE COUNTRY Burke's maternal family, the Nagles, was of the greatest surviving Catholic families in eighteenth-century Ireland, managing to escape the confiscation of property after the fall of the Stuarts at the Battle of the Boyne. Four branches of Nagles settled in the Blackwater Valley of North Cork, an area still known as country, where the leadership of the region's Gaelic Catholic interest remained in the family's hands for the first half of the eighteenth century. In the 1750s the Nagles married into Galway's affluent Catholic gentry society--into the only other Gaelic Catholic group managing to protect its lands from restrictions of the penal laws and encroachment of growing middle-class interests. The Nagles, therefore, achieved a position of influence and connection unequalled by any other Catholic family in Ireland. (4) Conversion to the Protestant religion--and subsequent discoveries by these converts of land illegally held by Catholics--became a routine part of conveyancing in eighteenth-century Ireland. Kevin Whelan has argued that conversions strengthened rather than weakened the Catholic position in Ireland, for prominent converts such as Anthony Malone, Lucius O'Brien, and John Hely-Hutchinson could now express their sympathy for Catholics in Parliament. Edmund Burke is best understood in this tradition. (5) His father conformed to the state church in 1722, when he was named executor to the estates of two uncles; because he had converted before his sons were born, they were considered Protestant. Burke's mother, however, remained a Catholic and, as was the custom, his sister, Juliana, followed her mother's religion. (6) Although officially viewed as Protestant, Burke himself married an Irish Catholic, Jane Nugent. Burke's association with Catholic Ireland had deeper roots than those of most of his fellow converts. O'Connell argues that he was probably born in his Uncle James's house in the Nagle country at Shanballymore, in the townland of Ballywalter. (7) The young Edmund may have been put to nurse in North Cork, and from six to eleven he lived with the family of his Uncle Patrick Nagle in his mother's childhood house in Shanballyduff. In of Burke's rare surviving personal letters, he remembers this uncle with affection and respect--as one of the very best men, I believe, that ever lived ... the person I should wish myself ... the most to resemble. (8) At Monanimy in the ruins of the great Nagle castle, Burke attended an unlicensed hedge-school that provided education for Gaelic Catholics in contravention of the Penal Laws; further instruction seems to have been supplied by the Jacobite poet Liam Inglis/English, master at nearby Castletownroche before he became an Augustinian friar in Cork city. …

This chapter considers the spread of print in eighteenth-century Ireland and its possible consequences. Increased annual output can be quantified, together with the spread of printing from Dublin into the Irish provinces, and a greater diversity of genres such as novels, essays, newspapers, reviews and journals. The steady and largely predictable growth can be connected with the increases in modest prosperity and literacy, especially in Dublin and larger towns. Consequences may include a growing politicisation, linking with the emergence of something that can be called a ‘public sphere’, and the increased militancy of radicals and conservatives especially from the 1770s onwards. Also, the growing availability of print in Ireland deepened the integration of Ireland into the British cultural, linguistic and (arguably) political orbits. At the same time, Ireland responded to fashions — intellectual and cultural — originating in continental Europe, many of which were spread through books.

Editors' Note Jean Allman and Antionette Burton After six years of editing the Journal of Women's History, we are packing it up and packing it in, downloading our databases onto flash drives, and sending the journal to its new home in Binghamton, New York. It is a hectic time, as we work to assure a smooth transition to the new editorial team, but it is also a time for reflection, as we think about all we had hoped to accomplish in our years as editors. Where did we hit the mark? Where did we fall short? We came to this editorial work with a shared commitment to the transnational possibilities of women's and feminist history and we did so at a time when very real and concrete changes in the mechanics of journal publishing and distribution were opening up a "virtual" world of possibilities in terms of new readers, new reviewers, and most importantly, new contributors. What would it mean to truly transnationalize women's history, rather than just simply bring international history to feminist historians based in North America? We have been able, over these past six years, to assemble and work with a board whose membership stretches across the globe. We now regularly receive submissions from feminist scholars from a range of locales and on an ever-expanding variety of topics. Still, as we opined in the journal's twentieth anniversary issue, that "virtual" world of possibilities is not equally accessible. Economic disparity, uneven access to resources, to avenues for publishing, and to bandwidth—not to mention the hegemony of English-language scholarship and the challenges of translation—continue to limit in profound and enduring ways who contributes to the Journal of Women's History and who reads it. If six years ago we imagined ourselves—perhaps somewhat naively—creating a space for transnational dialogue and debate around feminist histories, especially feminist histories that do not privilege the experiences of white middle-class women in the so-called "West," today we have developed a profound appreciation for how difficult it is to find that space. All too often "common ground" reproduces, at every turn, the hegemony of the North American academy or the unequal power relations and uneven access to resources that disaggregate academic labor globally. The thematic threads of feminist historiography, moreover, are not woven into a rich transnational tapestry of common concerns. They are disparate, often distinct and disconnected, and very much determined by local (regional and national) political economies of knowledge production. How do you balance contributions to area-specific knowledge against contributions to [End Page 9] comparative or transnational histories? What are the costs of privileging the latter over the former? How, when, and under what circumstances, as Adrienne Rich might ask, does "inclusion" become "incorporation" rather than transformation, let alone a radical revisioning? These are only some of the questions we will take away from our journal labors over these past six years. Still, our final issue does, we think, point toward the future. It points not just toward the promise, but toward the possibility of situating locally generated questions in comparative, transnational perspective; the possibility of crossing borders of all kinds. We have assembled here seven outstanding articles that range from eighteenth-century Ireland to the late-twentieth-century United States and address a host of fascinating topics from incubators to consumer boycotts, from truck adverts to movie magazines. We open with Mary O'Dowd's "Politics, Patriotism, and Women in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, Britain, and Colonial America," which takes on the common assumption among colonial Americanists that the consumer boycott was an "original American invention." Examining the political economy of Ireland in the eighteenth century and women's roles in advocating consumer boycotts of non-Irish goods, O'Dowd demonstrates how the specific colonial experiences of Ireland and America created particular roles for women in public discourse, especially around the consumption of goods. These were patriotic roles that were not in evidence in England or Scotland at the time and were arguably generated by the specificities of the marketplace in the colonial context. In "Slavery, U.S. Expansion, and Married Women's Property Law," Laurel Clark situates her work...

Editor’s Note Michelle Burnham In 2013, the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies took place in Cleveland, Ohio for the first time since the organization’s inaugural convention met there in 1970. That first ASECS meeting was followed up, one year later, with the publication of the first volume of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, which included exceptional papers drawn from among those delivered at that gathering. For 44 years and 44 volumes, the annual publication of SECC has accompanied and celebrated the scholarly life of ASECS by providing a space in which to acknowledge and share the excellent and wide-ranging work exchanged at the most recent meetings of its sponsoring organization. Over the four intervening decades, the journal has, of course, undergone changes as both the field of eighteenth-century studies and the ASECS organization itself have developed and grown. SECC has long since, for example, moved to a double-blind peer review process for submissions, keeping pace with the increasing number and quality of scholarly journals dedicated to eighteenth-century studies. At the same time, however, SECC has remained committed to considering for publication only articles that have been developed and revised from conference papers originally presented at the national or regional ASECS conferences, or those sponsored by its affiliate societies. Perhaps the journal’s most consistent commitment has been to representing the extraordinary interdisciplinary vibrancy that has sustained and continues to animate the organization. Year after year, the journal’s pages bring into proximity and dialogue the diversity of fields (such as art history, history, literature, musicology, dance, theater, women’s and gender studies, religious studies, and political science) as well as the transnational range of languages and cultures (including French, English, German, Italian, and Spanish studies) that converge at ASECS meetings. At the same time, the journal offers a rich record of the ways in which eighteenth-century studies has grown over the years to incorporate and intersect with emergent fields such as race and empire studies, disability studies, and material culture studies. Volume 44 opens with the 2013 Presidential Address delivered at the Cleveland meeting by Julie Candler Hayes. Hayes examines the overlooked genre of moralist writings to find subtle treatments by French women of the [End Page vii] unequal power relations that characterized marriage. These reflections also changed over the course of the century, as earlier writers such as Lambert and Puisieux often reflected on how female unhappiness almost unavoidably led to female infidelity in marriage, while later writers such as Verzure and d’Arconville tied their critiques of marriage and their celebration of the single life to an emergent political language of liberty and independence. The following three articles turn to the figure of the body and the growing field of disability studies in the context of eighteenth-century visual culture, philosophical writing, and medical discourse. Teresa Michals examines the changing visual representation of amputation from its comical exposure in caricature to its concealment in the genre of the formal portrait. Her close examination of portraits of Lord Nelson, however, reveal how these images of Nelson broke with this tradition by making amputation visible—a shift that revised or challenged conventional models of masculine and military heroism that relied on images of bodily integrity and gentlemanly status. Paul Kelleher illustrates how ideas of disability deeply inform the understanding of sympathy and morality developed in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. In a subtle and careful reading, Kelleher shows how disability (or what Smith refers to as deformity) is, in fact, the precondition for fellow feeling and moral subjectivity—a reading that makes Smith newly relevant for issues central to contemporary disability studies. Lucas Hardy considers the significance of the body in pain in the context of colonial New England and its 1721 smallpox epidemic. Focusing on the figure of Cotton Mather and his medical handbook, The Angel of Bethesda, Hardy argues that for Mather the bodily pain associated with inoculation and disease is a precondition not only for physical health but for spiritual conversion. Mather developed a theory of pain that challenged Lockean ideas by emphasizing the necessity of confronting rather than avoiding pain, as a...

ASECS at 50:Interview with Kevin Joel Berland Sonja Lawrenson (bio) and Kevin Joel Berland Kevin Joel Berland is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University. Berland's contribution to eighteenth-century studies is both prolific and profound. His research focuses on early modern intellectual history and literature, yet he has also produced distinguished scholarship on diverse aspects of the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century. The vast scope of his intellectual interests encompasses a dazzling array of areas of study, from physiology, physiognomy, and poetry, to Orientalism, travel writing, and Irish print culture. His most recent publications center upon colonial North America, with his scholarly edition of The Dividing Line Histories of William Byrd II of Westover (2013) garnering high praise for its innovation, integrity, and rigor. Within ASECS, however, Berland is as esteemed for his academic mentorship and support as he is respected for his scholarly achievements. Alongside many other professional distinctions, in 1993 the Society presented him with a special award acknowledging his pioneering work in the digital humanities. C18-L, the international online forum he founded in 1990, remains a vital virtual community within eighteenth-century studies. A former president of East-Central ASECS (EC/ASECS), Berland continues to contribute generously to the scholarly community not only through his editorial roles with Eighteenth-Century Life and Literary Compass, but also through mentoring activities, including his participation in the hugely popular "The Doctor is In" mentoring sessions at the annual Society meetings. Sonja Lawrenson: Given this year commemorates the 50th anniversary of ASECS, I would like to begin this interview by asking you about your earliest memories of [End Page 539] the organization. When did you first become involved in ASECS and what are your most noteworthy recollections of those early days of participation? Kevin Joel Berland: Like many ASECS members, I entered the Society through a regional group—in my case, EC/ASECS. I attended my first regional meeting the year after starting my job at Penn State, and my first ASECS presentation was in the EC/ASECS panel at an ASECS conference, as most regional groups offer a less imposing environment for graduate students and junior scholars. It seems to me, however, that it is much easier for junior scholars to get space on the conference program than it once was, perhaps because people are more prepared and doing scholarship much earlier in their careers. At its best, ASECS provides a space for testing ideas and critical approaches in a community of common interests, as well as support for individuals' sense of themselves as participants in the exchange of ideas. Networking is another key function of ASECS; I know many ASECS members who have gained opportunities for research, conference participation, and publishing through connections made at ASECS meetings, including regional meetings. This factor is exceedingly important for faculty not teaching in their major field; the number of eighteenth-century jobs is limited, and many excellent new Ph.D.s cannot find tenure-track positions in their field, so many wind up in positions teaching composition or as generalists in undergraduate courses. Separated from the dynamic exchange of ideas in graduate school, new faculty need to keep their scholarly minds alive. This was certainly my case as an entry-level faculty member, and, years later, I still benefit from conversations and suggestions from practically every conference I've attended. I have always left ASECS conferences on fire with enthusiasm for the ideas I've absorbed and the possibilities for my own scholarship. Lawrenson: As a longstanding participant of ASECS, what do you consider as the Society's most important contribution(s) to the field of eighteenth-century studies? How has the Society influenced the trajectory and agenda of eighteenth-century studies in the United States and beyond? Berland: Perhaps it was only a subjective view on my part, but when I started coming to ASECS conferences in the 1980s, it seemed that a sizeable majority of members—and conference panels—focused on literary studies, and especially on canonical English/British literature. But it was also a time in which female authors were being "rediscovered" and the (practically) all...

Forum Introduction: Intention and the Eighteenth-Century Text Mark Vareschi (bio) and Jess Keiser (bio) At least since W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946), intention has played an uneasy role in the interpretation of cultural artifacts. In the wake of their seminal essay, critics warred over the meaning, use, and abuse of intention in art and culture. While the 1970s and 1980s saw writers of a post-structuralist persuasion radicalizing Wimsatt and Beardsley’s attack by linking the latter’s fallacy with their own anti-humanist stance, the 1990s witnessed a resurgence of critics defending intention as an analytic category. These decades demonstrated that more was at stake in debates about intention than critical praxis; ethics, politics, and institutional formations were all tied into how one understood intention. It is easy to assume that, with the new millennium, the debates about intention that exercised Wimsatt, Beardsley, and their heirs have fallen by the wayside. But the following essays tell a different story. The problem of intention has persisted in cultural criticism, and it is arguably at the heart of a number of innovative, new approaches in eighteenth-century studies. From new materialism’s reappraisal of agency, which has raised questions about the relation between the actions and intentions of actors both human and non-human, to digital humanities’ scaling up of its objects of analysis to the point where intention may well be regarded as a collective, rather [End Page 209] than individual, phenomenon, intention has been a persistent—if rarely explicit—concern in recent critical work. These essays look to the eighteenth century as a key period for thinking through the problems and potentials of intention. They seek new ways of defining the concept by exploring Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary; surveying the reception of Beethoven’s music as a way of reclaiming intention for contemporary criticism; looking to Defoe’s Crusoe to consider the friction between a person’s motivations and actions; and discovering in eighteenth-century pornography a conception of intention that belongs not to individual bodies but to larger collectives. In doing so, they are building on important recent work in eighteenth-century studies that has turned away from earlier rejections of intention. Frances Ferguson’s important essay “Rape and the Rise of the Novel,” with its nuanced examination of the role intention plays in eighteenth-century legal fictions, arguably sparked this resurgent interest in the topic. Following Ferguson, Jonathan Kramnick’s Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson and Sandra Macpherson’s Harm’s Way: Tragic Responsibility and the Novel Form demonstrate that there is more at stake in eighteenth-century accounts of intention than efforts to confirm or dismiss the plans and designs ostensibly hidden away in the author’s mind. By asking us to rethink the relationship between willful subjects and the actions they (ostensibly) intend, Kramnick’s and Macpherson’s books reveal the ethical, political, and even ontological stakes of eighteenth-century writings on intention. In this work, intention is neither the bogeyman to be avoided nor the master key to textual interpretation; intention becomes one feature among many requiring interpretation. The essays in this forum reflect this expanded account of intention. Basing themselves on Ferguson’s, Kramnick’s, and Macpherson’s seminal writings, they reconsider the place of intention in the creation, reception, and content of cultural objects. Stephanie Hershinow raises the question of disciplinary difference in accounts of, and engagements with, intention and intentionality in literary studies and analytical philosophy. Sarah Ellenzweig considers the ongoing material turn in humanities scholarship, which asks us to attribute agency and intention not simply to human beings but also to non-human things. The essay combats the presentism of this “new materialism” by tracing its concerns to a cluster of eighteenth-century texts. Edmund Goehring argues for the continued relevance of artistic and authorial intention in the work of interpretation. Crucial to his argument is an account of artistic objects as actions or utterances in which intention may be read off the objects themselves. By thinking about the relationship between intending and remembering, Sarah Eron seeks to overcome the mind-matter binary. Her essay argues that only minds embodied in...

299 An Irishwoman of letters between Newman and Wagner: Geraldine Penrose Fitzgerald (1846–1939), her literary, religious and political career Patrick Maume* [Accepted 19 April 2018. Published 14 June 2018] This paper analyses the life and writings of a significant late Victorian Irish woman writer who has attracted little attention. Loeber and Loeber’s guide to Irish fiction lists Geraldine Penrose Fitzgerald as the author of four novels whose content suggests she may have been Irish. In fact, Penrose Fitzgerald was a member of a Cork landed family heavily involved in the Land War; as a convert to Catholicism who corresponded with John Henry Newman, and as a Wagner aficionado who wrote several books on eighteenth-century Ireland and on Mitteleuropean subjects under the pen-name ‘Frances Gerard’. This paper draws on her surviving published and unpublished correspondence; on scattered newspaper references, and on an analysis of her six novels to discuss her responses to the Land War and to late nineteenthcentury feminism. It suggests that her later move from extreme pro-landlord conservatism to republicanism may have been influenced by her (conservative) suffragism. Geraldine Penrose Fitzgerald, who was born in Cork city in 1846, belonged to a County Cork gentry family prominent on the landlord side in the conflicts of the 1880s. Her position as a ‘surplus’unmarried daughter in a family largely tolerant of her interests both enabled and constrained her, in a manner characteristic of many Victorian upper-class families. Penrose Fitzgerald was a Catholic convert and admirer of John Henry Newman, with whom she corresponded; these exchanges provide valuable though sporadic opportunities to glimpse the private attitudes and concerns (often muted in print) which shape her published writings. She published five novels as ‘Naseby’ between 1870 and 1890, and another novel and eight books on eighteenth-century Irish high society and Germanic topics (she was a Wagnerian ) as ‘Frances A. Gerard’between 1889 and 1903.1 The ‘Naseby’novels manifest * Author’s e-mail: pmaume@googlemail.com doi: https://doi.org/10.3318/PRIAC.2018.118.02 1 The origins of Penrose Fitzgerald’s pseudonyms are unclear; possibly there was a family connectiontothe1645Battleof NasebyduringtheEnglishCivilWar,and‘FrancesA.Gerard’ may derive from a partial rearrangement of her name with the ‘A’ representing her mother’s maiden name Austen, but in our current state of knowledge these are purely speculative. Introduction Abstract Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy Vol. 118C, 299–326 © 2018 Royal Irish Academy Patrick Maume 300 a trajectory from depiction of the regeneration of the landed class through moral and religious reawakening (implicitly though not explicitly Catholic) to anger and near-despair over the violence of the land agitation; the ‘Frances A. Gerard’books, which were more commercially oriented, may suggest escape from a diminished present into eighteenth-century aesthetics and German romanticism, but they interrogate their subjects as well as celebrate them. Penrose Fitzgerald was a suffragist (albeit of conservative views) which possibly influenced her later conversion to Irish nationalism, yet in the 1920s she moved to England, where she died in 1939. Penrose Fitzgerald is largely forgotten except by a few historians of Irish literature and Newman scholars; both groups are largely unaware of her full career . Ralph and Magda Loeber’s standard bibliography of Irish fiction 1650–1900 lists four novels by her, but provides no biographical details beyond: ‘floruit 1870. Given the Irish settings of Geraldine Penrose Fitzgerald’s stories, she was probably Irish or of Irish extraction’.2 Newman’s letters to Penrose Fitzgerald (and extracts from her few surviving letters to him) are in his published correspondence, and two studies of Newman mention her: Meriol Trevor presents her as a charming young woman whose treatment of Newman as substitute grandfather testifies to his continuing ability to befriend the young,3 and Joyce Sugg emphasises her self-­ dramatisation and the worries she caused Newman.4 This paper combines literary analysis of her publications and dealings with Newman, with information located in contemporary newspapers. It draws on the few surviving letters from Penrose Fitzgerald to Newman at the Birmingham Oratory, and provides the first—albeit fragmentary—overview of a life touching on many religious, agrarian and political tensions of Ireland under the...

When the US acquired its colonies of Puerto Rico and the Philippines in the aftermath of the 1898 war with Spain, those colonies had to be made known to American citizens. Lanny Thompson has described what he calls the “principle narratives” of the different colonies, and the ways that those narratives helped shape political debates about those colonies. Thompson notes that photography played an instrumental role in developing and representing those narratives. “Colonial Photography Across Empires and Islands” discusses the specific uses of photography in the US colonial regimes in the Philippines and Puerto Rico, the two colonies most frequently deemed “unfit” for self-rule. It traces the contours of those themes and ideas that were shared across the different colonies, as well as the particular subject matter that photographers were attracted to in each colony. It also finds points of connection and continuity between US colonial photography, and photography in the Philippines in the Spanish colonial era. The triangulation of these three colonial contexts helps clarify both the generalized nature of colonial photography and the specific uses of photography in particular colonial contexts.

New Eighteenth Centuries Lawrence Lipking Sooner or later, we scholars and critics are dated. An essay called "A History of the Future" might try to predict what will happen in eighteenth-century studies, but soon enough becomes a souvenir of the moment when it was written (or perhaps a moment before).1 A book called The New Eighteenth Century eventually fits on a shelf with other relics of newness, like the old New Criticism. If we are lucky, some remnants survive; a few New Critics are breathing still. But making their innovations seem fresh again depends on recreating the contexts that once gave them life. At one time, we have to remember, the past was new. When The New Eighteenth Century was new, in 1987, I was taken aback by what its introductory essay said about my history of the future. For one thing, "The" was substituted for the "A" in my title. To write the history of the future, as if a crystal ball could be definitive, would be preposterous. Moreover, the error reproduced the most objectionable word in the editors' own title: The. New eighteenth centuries had always been plentiful, beginning in the eighteenth century itself, but a book that purported to contain the new eighteenth century (in its 1987 version) was bound to overlook a great many other versions.2 And the editors compounded that error when they claimed that I seemed "caught" between my "passion for the new" and "fear of it."3 Some new things deserve our passion, some do not. My essay does not recognize the categorical new, which squeezes the heads of a hydra into one "it"; nor did I ever join the party of the New Historicism. Perhaps a herald of the new needs always to rewrite the past. That was certainly true of my own history of the future. It responded to a particular situation. In 1972 the English Institute had launched a series on New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Literature, which began with four talks. The results distressed Paul de Man, who chaired the Institute in 1973. The approaches had struck him as not very new, and one of them, Donald Greene's "The Study of Eighteenth-Century Literature: Past, Present, and Future," bristled with what would later be [End Page 327] called the resistance to theory. De Man asked me to organize another session and open my own talk to new approaches. The assignment appealed to me, not only because the time was ripe for a sea change in eighteenth-century studies, cued by the founding of ASECS in 1969, but also because I had recently taken over as editor of "The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century" in the popular Norton Anthology of English Literature. At that time the canon seemed stultified—not a single woman author in the whole first volume of the anthology (2,000 pages), no reference to slavery or empire or the class system, no hint of the revolutions brewing both then and now. There was an obvious need for fresh air. In the third edition (1974) I was allowed some timid additions: Anne Finch, a bit of sex from Rochester, Johnson's "Brief to Free a Slave," Smart's "My Cat Jeoffry," Burke on the American Revolution. But clearly the rigid notion of "English Literature" was ready to be rethought. What might it be in the future? Rereading my talk now, more than four decades later, I find it dated in many ways. Its pronouns, for instance, assume that authors and scholars are men (save for one reference to "men and women"). It tends to focus on what was then the received canon of English literature (later editions of the Norton Anthology would venture far outside). It limits its excursions into theory, except for Foucault (more than one person has told me that my talk was the first time they heard about him). But most of all, it subscribes to a humanistic vision of progress, not only in scholarship but also in the stories that scholars tell about the eighteenth century itself, whose radical changes in society and art are credited with provoking ideas that still inspire hope for a better world. By 1987...

The main current of eighteenth-century studies still runs deep with empirical details. As we go to press, the 2004 meeting of ASECS (American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies) has just concluded. The meeting had something for everyone, from panels devoted to teaching poetry in the undergraduate classroom to roundtable discussions about the future of sexuality studies. Yet amidst all the variety and methodological self-consciousness that one can find these days, an impressively large number of papers justified their claims for a hearing by emphasizing the curious and the particular. Discovering new facts, recovering and editing neglected or obscure texts and authors, or lingering over the odd and the rare still constitute central demonstrations of scholarly legitimacy in eighteenth-century studies. Such respect for the empirical is laudable, even exemplary. It reflects how much the eighteenth-century archive is still under construction, how much work there still is to be done even in making available influential works. Who would have twenty years ago thought that there is a large body of working class poetry in the eighteenth century? And who would have expected that there is more than enough material to fill a three-volume edition, just published by Pickering and Chatto under the general editorship of John Goodrich?1 At the same time, however, our reliance on and ease with empirical detail too often isolates such details from wider intellectual currents and theoretical problems. This continued reliance on the empirical motivates our special focus section. approaches are particularly important for eighteenth-century studies because they make us rethink the details and help to show how they relate to broader intellectual currents.The need to awaken eighteenth-century literary studies from its cozy relationship with history and empiricism is a familiar story. It was, after all, as early as 1987 that Laura Brown and Felicity Nussbaum diagnosed in The New Eighteenth Century a distinct resistance to theoretical discourse in a field that had highly valued the concreteness of biography, history, and bibliography. At the same time, Brown and Nussbaum noted important efforts in the direction of more contextualized and politicized approaches, and these efforts multiplied after the publication of their volume with the spread of the new historicism. In our view, the new historicism has been in equal parts good and bad for the eighteenth century. It revitalized eighteenth-century studies because its program contained an inviting pedagogical imperative. By removing the boundaries between different kinds of texts-legal, popular, political, didactic, and literary-the new historicism leveled disciplinary hierarchies and sent countless graduate students into a suddenly demystified, open archive in which everything could be related to everything else. History learned the joys of the surprising conjunction and literature the anxious pleasures of expanding boundaries. Advice manuals on marriage and political treatises, accounting books and travel journals became quickly, alongside recognized and not-so recognized literary texts, legitimate objects of literary interpretation. This wasn't the victory of Fredric Jameson's famous dictum always historicize! but rather the victory of don't hesitate, relate! The complaint that such seemingly arbitrary leveling of discursive differences was not historical enough and rather more spatial than temporal was quick to follow, and it could be heard from scholars as different in methodological orientation as Jameson and Steven Zwicker.2The fresh energy that kicked up such serious dust in the archive could produce results quickly in part because an older generation of scholars had created the bibliographical tools that allowed quick access to out-of-the-way texts. Today, these resources, thanks to the digitization of texts in English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), Literature Online (LION), Early English Books Online (EEBO), and various other online archives, are becoming even more instantaneously available. …

Reviewed by: Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for global Native literary studies by Chadwick Allen Jodi A. Byrd Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for global Native literary studies By Chadwick Allen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. One of the more gratifying aspects of studying Indigenous issues at the moment, especially given that the scholarship seems poised to offer a sustained transformation of the conversations pursued at the interstices of postcolonial studies, global studies and critical ethnic studies, is the acumen with which scholars within the field are offering new avenues and innovative ethics for engaging in what are, by necessity, often comparative projects across diverse historical and colonial contexts. As local and global iterations of Indigenous studies articulate the stakes for decolonial analyses of Indigenous governance, resistance and sovereignty, the related fields of literary and cultural studies have followed suit by taking up questions of intellectual, aesthetic and literary sovereignty within and beyond the injunctions of nationalism, cultural patrimony, and rights and responsibilities. In articulating the vitality of Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies as philosophically and theoretically sophisticated reading practices, Indigenous studies scholars have called for Indigenous peoples to understand themselves within a global network of other Indigenous societies. Rather than wait in the dustbins of history for that moment in which our own communities might arrive at the table as fully recognized nations within the West, such scholars suggest we might gain more by shifting our attention from such neoliberal traps of recognition and statehood and turn instead to the production of our own modes of intelligibility within and through Indigeneity as a resistant and sustainable alternative to the culture and politics of imperial global capitalism underwriting international state norms. Toward that end, Chadwick Allen’s most recent book from the Indigenous Americas series with the University of Minnesota Press seeks to intervene in some of the extant pitfalls that have emerged when undertaking comparative projects in Indigenous studies. The introduction to the book declares a new method for working across global Native literary studies, and even if read on its own without the chapters that follow, it is a provocative reimagining of the possibilities that might emerge if scholars were to take seriously the notion that discrete Indigenous cultures warrant centrality as world-builders in and of themselves. Beginning with the observation that what is presented as comparative within the academy can, more often than we might like to acknowledge, rely upon such perennially fuzzy notions of like and unlike, between and among, and compare and contrast, Allen’s introduction suggests a sea change in how scholars committed to thinking through the stakes of comparative approaches might reframe and transform their work. To shift the terrain from like and between, Allen persuasively argues against such modes of “‘together (yet) distinct’” (xiii). What he offers instead is the concept of trans- repositioned as across and through, and altered by its relation to Indigeneity. Certainly within the fields of transnational and global literary studies, the trans- is already operationalized as a critical analytic, and yet Allen returns us to this prefix as a force of recovery that repositions interpretative authority within the cultural and literary contexts through which Maori, American Indian, Hawaiian and Australian Aboriginal writers articulate their own linguistic aesthetics and political revolutions. Seeking juxtapositions rather than comparisons, relationalities rather than causalities, and genealogies rather than heritages, the trans- confronts and recenters Indigeneity rather than nation as the site for any comparative undertaking. Within the deep settler colonial histories of the geopolitical spaces his ambitious book charts, including Australia, the United States and Aotearoa New Zealand, Allen makes claims for a locally situated Indigenous global that could transform a field. “Trans- could be the next post-,” he writes (xv). In the chapters that follow, Allen seeks, with archival and textual analysis, to demonstrate how such juxtapositions can serve as decolonial methodologies of interpretation and recovery on the one hand and of aesthetic and artistic sovereignty on the other. Divided into two sections with two chapters in Part I, and three chapters in Part II, the book begins by locating Indigenous literary aesthetics within the political and intellectual struggles that emerged in the mid-twentieth century. Part I takes an expansive approach to the...

This chapter draws on modern ideas about adolescence to explore writings by girls in eighteenth-century Ireland. The central source used for this analysis is the journal of Mary Shackelton Leadbeater, which she began when she was 11 years of age. The format and tone of Shackleton Leadbeater’s journal changed as she moved into her late teens and began to engage more with the public world of the Irish Quaker community. The chapter also draws on writings by other Irish women to chart the transition from girlhood through to young adulthood. A subsidiary theme in the chapter is the extent to which printed advice books influenced the behavior of middle-class girls in eighteenth-century Ireland.

Although library resources available to the public at large were not extensive in eighteenth-century Ireland, they were far greater than has been shown previously. From eighteenth-century Irish newspapers and lists of subscribers to books published in Ireland by subscription, this paper identifies eighteen commercial lending libraries and eleven book clubs not hitherto mentioned in studies of Irish libraries of that period. The paper also discusses early catalogs of the two public libraries established by act of Parliament during the eighteenth century and stresses the importance of the borrowing record of the Armagh Public Library as the only document of its type surviving from eighteenth-century Ireland.