Empire and Attachment: A Transnational Tale

Abstract

This paper re‐examines the conceptual ground of Irish nationalism during the Romantic period, tracking the doubled impacts of French political and literary culture on those writers who cultivated an image of their work – and of themselves – as both popular and politically engaged. Here, the author argues that the moderate but impassioned nationalism of Sydney Owenson's novel The Wild Irish Girl is grounded in the fundamental principles of political liberalism as it emerged in France during the post‐Revolutionary era. Like Owenson's other writings, The Wild Irish Girl reads political liberalism as mediated by a culture of sentiment that construes public problems as matters of personal import, elevating private interests to the status of political claims. This confusion of public and private life emerges as an enduring strategy of liberal cosmopolitanism, one which fixes national affiliation as a purely cultural practice whose claims ought to be taken up and relinquished with equal and spontaneous ease.