Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Dedication
- Introduction: Reading from the Margins
- 1 Contesting the Jupien Effect: Annotation in the Eighteenth Century
- 2 The Author in the Margins: Annotation as Site of Conflict
- 3 Margins and Marginality: Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) and Sydney Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl (1806)
- 4 The Imperial Collection: Robert Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer: A Metrical Romance (1801)
- 5 The Margins of the Nation: Robert Burns's Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786) and Walter Scott's Waverley (1814)
- 6 Byron's Errantry: Lord Byron and John Cam Hobhouse's Annotation for Cantos I, II and IV of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1811–16)
- Conclusion: Romantic Marginality and Beyond
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
3 - Margins and Marginality: Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) and Sydney Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl (1806)
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Dedication
- Introduction: Reading from the Margins
- 1 Contesting the Jupien Effect: Annotation in the Eighteenth Century
- 2 The Author in the Margins: Annotation as Site of Conflict
- 3 Margins and Marginality: Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) and Sydney Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl (1806)
- 4 The Imperial Collection: Robert Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer: A Metrical Romance (1801)
- 5 The Margins of the Nation: Robert Burns's Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786) and Walter Scott's Waverley (1814)
- 6 Byron's Errantry: Lord Byron and John Cam Hobhouse's Annotation for Cantos I, II and IV of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1811–16)
- Conclusion: Romantic Marginality and Beyond
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Introduction: Two Types of Marginality
Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) and Sydney Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl (1806) feature extensive notes, providing translations of Irish dialect, ethnographic accounts of native Irish social practices and polemical interventions into antiquarian debates of the period. Each of these works is addressed primarily to an English audience, seeking to elucidate the cultural and political situation of Ireland. Edgeworth's novel is an account of a Protestant landowning family, the Rackrents, narrated by their native Irish servant, Thady Quirk. Importantly, Ina Ferris has claimed that The Wild Irish Girl is ‘the first national tale’: a genre popular in the early nineteenth century that typically featured an English protagonist travelling to the Celtic peripheries and coming to admire the cultural riches and independent spirit of the inhabitants. Other examples included Charles Maturin's The Milesian Chief (1811) and Susan Ferrier's Destiny: or the Chieftain's Daughter (1831). Owenson's volume comprises a series of epistles written by Horatio Mortimer, the son of an English lord, as he journeys across Ireland, and falls in love with the native landscape and geography, eventually becoming engaged to Glorvina, the daughter of a deposed Irish king. In this chapter I argue that the notes for both novels manifest their authors’ dual marginality as Irish women writers.
In the first place, Edgeworth and Owenson use the margins as a site of cultural translation, mediating rural Ireland to metropolitan English readers.
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- Information
- Romantic MarginalityNation and Empire on the Borders of the Page, pp. 49 - 72Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014