“With a Knife at One’s Throat”

Padma Rangarajan, “‘With a Knife at One’s Throat’: Irish Terrorism in The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys” (pp. 294–317) Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan’s The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys (1827) is a silver-fork novel edged in steel: a portrait of aristocratic 1790s Dublin society that doubles as anti-imperialist jeremiad. It is also one of the earliest pieces of fiction to explicitly identify terrorism as an inevitable consequence of colonial conquest. In this essay, I demonstrate how Morgan’s novel upends the standard definition of terrorism as a singular historical rift and rewrites it as a condition of life. Modernity has no chance in Ireland, Morgan argues, if the colonial parasitism of the past continues unabated. In The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys, Morgan prefigures Frantz Fanon’s diagnoses of the colonized psyche by carefully detailing the psychological and material effects of symbiotic terrorism—that is, terrorism as a complex network of reciprocal, mutually constitutive violent exchanges. Intertwining the thwarted legacy of the 1798 Irish Rebellion, the ongoing depredations of the Irish Ascendancy class, and her fears of an imminent revolution of the peasantry, Morgan mines Ireland’s near and distant past to forecast violence’s inevitable futurity.

Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture

The nineteenth-century Italian Risorgimento, or ‘resurgence’, re-drew Europe’s map to create a new nation-state: Italy. Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture argues that the Risorgimento radically shaped nineteenth-century British political, literary and cultural landscapes. Crossing borders, political divides and genres, this study examines the intersections of literary works by Mary Shelley, Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson), Giovanni Ruffini, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and others with journalism, parliamentary records and pamphlets, to establish Britain’s imaginative investment in this seismic geopolitical realignment. This book explores four political focal points of British engagement with Italian unification, moving between two crucial turning points that shaped Europe’s geopolitical map, the 1815 Congress of Vienna and 1861 creation of the Kingdom of Italy, to excavate the unsettling fusion of political optimism and disaffection produced through the collision of British and Italian politics and culture. British and Anglo-Italian responses to the Risorgimento reveal a complicated, decades-long print contest that played out across high literary modes, pamphlets and propaganda, memoirs and travelogues, parliamentary debates, journalism and emerging genres like sensation fiction. This study argues that forging a new state demands both making and unmaking; as the Risorgimento re-mapped Europe’s geopolitical reality, it also reframed how the British saw themselves, their politics and their place within Europe. These chapters demonstrate that the nation-building enterprise of Risorgimento culture was a participatory, international field crossing borders, print forms, political parties and literary genres, which played an invigorating role for British political discourse and print culture.

The Novice in the City

This chapter explores two competing representations of Paris in an early- and a late-career novel by Sydney Owenson. It argues that, in The Novice of Saint Dominick, Paris functions as a conservative site of socialization, while in The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys, the French capital becomes a site of liberal reforms and social mobility.In the earlier novel, Owenson focuses on the dangers of a woman’s involvement in metropolitan economics in order to enforce her submission to a masculine authority through the use of debts and cosmopolitan understandings of the market. The later novel uses the Paris Opera house to highlight the development of urban literacy.

Uneasy Alliances: Liberty and the Nation

In imagining the safe politicisation of the ‘mass’ in commercial modernity, the idea of the nation as a focus for enthusiasm is key. Yet in the British context the nation itself was a troubled concept. Hence, as Chapter 3 explores, historical novelists drew upon the comparative potential of stadial history, trying to reimagine British liberty in relation to the competing nationalisms of the sister kingdoms and the empire. As novelists like Henry Siddons, Anna Maria Mackenzie, James White, Anna Millikin, Ellis Cornelia Knight, Maria Edgeworth and Jane Porter realised, such competing nationalisms would have to be carefully balanced, shaped by new historical narratives, if national feeling were not to be as threatening to the emergent state as class identity. As such, the historical novel is an important forerunner to the national tales of Sydney Owenson and Maria Edgeworth.