Natural Language, Scientific Discourse and Auto-Ethnographic Representation in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

Abstract

Travel literature produced by rural Irish writers at the end of the nineteenth century provides an interesting contrast to previous British representations of Irish landscape and culture. Referencing the theories of Michel de Certeau, this article contrasts self-representational work produced in rural Donegal with the production of Ordnance Survey memoir materials in early nineteenth-century Ireland. Examining indigenous representations of landscape, we can see that Ireland remained not simply a landscape that was "unsettled" as noted by Thomas Colby, Head of the 1837 survey, but rather a heteroglossic linguistic landscape containing its own discourse of marginalization.