Internal (Post)Coloniality in Anglo-Irish Literature: Crossing the Boundaries in Postcolonial Comparative Studies

Abstract

AbstractThis study is the revision and exploration of the author’s essay entitled “Ireland as an Internal Colony: the Irish Literary Revival in Search of de-Anglicisation”, published in the proceedings of the 2006 PASE conference. As demonstrated in that paper, the Irish colonial and postcolonial status is characterised by its distinctiveness, due to the idea of internal colonialism, which, according to Michael Hechter, has governed the Anglo-Irish economic, political and cultural relations since the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the field of this internal colonialism, literary scholars and critics have already noticed patterns of colonisation, studied, for instance, by Vincent Cheng or Anna Cisło on the basis of the Victorian ethnocentrism, and decolonisation, frequently studied on the example of the Irish Literary Revival. However, these observations were rather omitted in a more general field of postcolonial studies, dealing with the literatures of the Second- and Third-World societies, and it was not until the beginning of the twenty-first century that Irish postcoloniality crossed the boundaries of postcolonial investigation. Developed from both the aforementioned essay and the author’s further research projects concerning Irish postocoloniality, the present study offers a review of the most current approaches towards the question of internal colonialism and postcolonialism, discernible in Irish literature, in the context of postcolonial comparative studies.KeywordsPostcolonial TheoryCultural DistinctivenessInternal ColonialismColonial RelationPostcolonial StudyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.