FOR ALMOST TWO DECADES postcolonialism held center stage in Irish studies, especially in Irish literary studies. That prominence has now passed and, indeed, in Irish Classics (2000) Declan Kiberd, a central figure in its promotion, has recently signalled that the time has come to move on.

The postcolonial moment in Irish studies illustrates an oppositional side to Irish academic discourse that can be traced back to the foundations of the Irish state. Newly independent Ireland in the 1920s represented the triumph of the bourgeois nationalist project of the nineteenth century. In the early 1930s two historians, T. W. Moody and R. D. Edwards, taking their cue from their English mentor, Sir Herbert Butterfield, who had decried the Whig view of history in Britain, determined to challenge the nationalist teleology of history in Ireland. Their efforts were highly successful within the academy. In what seems now a somewhat naïve assertion, though, they claimed to have established history as an objective form of discourse.

By the 1970s Ireland had changed. Appalled by the violence in Northern Ireland, much of the population in the republic of Ireland became skeptical about nationalism. Historians were swimming with the current rather than against it and eventually came in for criticism, not only from a radical minority within their discipline, but also from literary and cultural critics. The established form of history was dubbed revisionism and was accused of being partisan in an anti-nationalist and, indeed, pro-British direction. Literary critics embraced postcolonial studies as a means of restoring the sense of trauma and validating the sense of struggle in the Irish story. Postcolonialism also seemed to open up a future for Ireland, not as a cozy partner of capitalism, but as comrade of countries in the developing world. Postcolonial critics in turn were sometimes accused of simply trying to recuperate the nationalist past and whereas this may have been true at times on an emotional level it was not so on the intellectual level. The postcolonial paradigm was just as critical of bourgeois nationalism as it was of imperialism. However, with the unprecedented prosperity of the republic in the 1990s, the result of a fulsome embrace of capitalism, and the virtual ending of the troubles in Northern Ireland in the late 1990s postcolonial studies began to seem like an outdated method of analysis and it is not yet clear what will replace it.

One of the most fraught areas for discussion between revisionists and postcolonialists (if I may use those inadequate terms for convenience) was that of the status of Ireland during the period of the union (1801–1922) with Britain. Was it part of the metropolitan center or a colony? There is much to be gained from seeing Ireland as a colony. However, it seems to me that a simple dichotomy between colonizer and colonized is both impossible and not very useful in analyzing nineteenth-century Ireland, as all groups within the country were products of the then eight hundred year interaction between Ireland and England/Britain. What I find impressive about several of the texts which I will be examining in this article is that while they make use of the postcolonial perspective they do so from a sophisticated stance which eschews easy dichotomies. They show that interaction between Ireland and Britain was complex and multifaceted and take us beyond some of the dead ends of the revisionist/postcolonialist debate.

Studies of the literature of nineteenth-century Ireland have in the last few years focused inter alia on issues of gender as well as colonialism, on discourses of race (Celticism) and nation (epic), and on genres such as the national tale and the gothic novel. These latter were important for the entire century but have their roots in the earlier part of it. Texts produced within them were very often preoccupied with the notion of union, that term from the domestic sphere, which was used for the political amalgamation of Britain and Ireland in 1801. My only caveat with this attention to the ideology of union is an historical one. Most Victorians blithely spoke of their country as England, rather than as Britain. Indeed, when someone remonstrated with Lord Salisbury for doing so at a public meeting in Scotland in the 1890s he was unapologetic. The United Kingdom, the title that acknowledges the union of Britain and (Northern) Ireland, seems in fact only to have been in vogue as a name for the country since the second world war.

In Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing 1790–1870, Mary Jean Corbett explores the “gendered idiom of marriage and family” (3) as it was used after the Act of Union to describe the relationship between England and Ireland. What interests her in fact are the ways in which hegemonic discourse intended for an English audience dealt with the fact of Irish resistance and she believes that “transforming the cultural conception of Englishness” (5) was just as important a part of the process as the representation of Irishness. It is this perspective, seeing the impact of the interface of the two cultures as being two way, which makes her book an important contribution to shaping the new age of Irish cultural commentary.

Though she notes that tropes of husband and wife or parent and child imply a hierarchical relationship which might be used to map supposed racial differences between the two countries, “simply binaries cannot hold” (3). This is because such tropes gesture towards intimacy and “family thinking entails likeness as well as otherness; it establishes a proximate internal contrast that cannot be entirely reduced to the polar opposition of essential difference” (18).

For Edmund Burke, in his objection to the French revolution, an attack on the monarchical state was tantamount to an assault on the patriarchal family. “Burke figures the worst excesses of the revolutionaries as a threat of uncontained female sexuality that could destroy all traditional ties” (26–27) and can only be resisted by “the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion” (27). This was also the reason why he objected to the penal laws against Catholics in Ireland, as wives and younger sons conforming to Protestantism could challenge patriarchal authority. Corbett sees this critique also at work in Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) where the disfunction of the Rackrent landlords can be viewed as the product of the disruption “in indigenous familial and communal practices that English law had created” (45). Interestingly, the Rackrent women, who contrive not to produce heirs, manage to escape their marriages with their fortunes intact.

In considering the novels of Edgeworth and Lady Morgan which imagine the union of Britain and Ireland in terms of a “national marriage” between an English or Anglo-Irish landlord and a displaced Gaelic heroine Corbett's interest is in the reformation of the male partner. In the case of Horatio in Morgan's The Wild Irish Girl (1806) she sees the role of Irish difference as being that of a “transformative power” (56). By going native Horatio actually becomes “another better self, with Irishness figured as a humanizing force” (58). The novel thus narrates a “crisis of English identity” (70). It is Horatio who needs to be prepared for union and not his decidedly stable and distinctly unwild Irish partner, Glorvina. By contrast Edgeworth's The Absentee (1812) is more Burkean in locating the unstable element in the female side. When her origins are eventually legitimated the heroine Grace Nugent turns out to be English. Corbett sees her as losing none of her capacity to effect an Irish-English reconciliation in her marriage to Lord Colambre, though, as for Edgeworth racial “national origins” matter much less than chosen “national affections” (75).

Corbett next focuses her interest in the transformative power of the Irish on the English in mid-century Britain itself. At the time it was feared that Irish immigrants might make the English working class more like themselves. In Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1854–55) “immigrants are deployed en masse as a differentiating figure that marks off the border of inclusion” (87). The image of disease pervaded the sociological texts of the time. James Philip Kay's 1832 account of the Manchester cotton industry moves “from disease-as-cholera to disease-as-Irishness” (99) and “a similar rhetoric of endemic disease informs Carlyle's well-known representation of Irish immigration in Chartism (1839)” (100). Engels in The Condition of the World Class in England (1845) hopes the Irish will hasten class conflict. Like Gaskell he thinks the Irish have the potential to degrade English workers. However, this is something he welcomes as it will widen the gulf between the working and middle classes. In Charles Kingley's novel of Chartism, Alton Locke (1850), the Irish also, ironically, turn out to be a beneficial force as their support for Chartism contributes to its downfall, thus leaving the way open for the English working class to be redeemed by a new cross-class brotherhood.

Turning to an English novelist in Ireland, Corbett sees Anthony Trollope's Irish novels as producing “a field for inventing Irish and English character alike” (117). Generation after generation of the central family in The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847) are seen to be short sighted in their dealings with their estate. Thady Macdermot is executed for a murder which is wrongly presumed to be politically motivated, Trollope's point being that contrary to popular English perceptions the Irish in fact lack the ability to conspire. The novel's lesson is once more for the English rulers of Ireland: “those who are empowered to rule Ireland are instead ruled by their exaggerated fears” (128). Castle Richmond (1860) is poised at what Trollope saw as the opportune time of famine for reforming the Irish land system. Gentry, epitomized in Sir Thomas Fitzgerald, and “people of the country” (138) are alike seen as victims of the famine. Sir Thomas's son Herbert represents the industrious qualities of the English bourgeoisie and is chosen in marriage by the novel's heroine, Clara Desmond, in preference to his more romantic cousin Owen Fitzgerald.

Corbett ends her exploration in the 1860s considering the attitude of liberals such as John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold for both of whom the acknowledged failure of the union was a reflection on “England's character” (151). For Mill changing English ideas was more necessary than changing Irish ones. “For Arnold, the failure to resolve the internal ‘contradiction’ among conflicting [Celtic and Anglo-Saxon] elements within Englishness is writ large in the political sphere of English-Irish relations and with one conflict mirroring the other in perfect symmetry” (164).

Ina Ferris's The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland also begins with problematizing the relationship between Britain and Ireland under the union: “Ireland is at once a part of the kingdom (a political subject) but not a part of Great Britain (not a national subject). Where the names of Scotland and England have been resolved into the larger unity of Great Britain, holding out the possibility of both preserving and assimilating national difference, Ireland stands within the union but outside the unity” (1). As I have indicated above, however, things may not have been quite so positive for the Scots as this seems to indicate.

Ferris's focus is on Ireland itself and on the question of the denial of what was called Catholic Emancipation. She rightly sees it as less important for itself – the prevention of Catholics from sitting in parliament – than for what it symbolized – the exclusion of the entire Catholic community from civil and political life.

It is within this general political context that Ferris locates the genre of the national tale, which was designed to produce sympathy, and the work of Lady Morgan, in particular. The immediate precursor of the national tale was the civic-minded travel narrative which “sought to gain for Ireland a new kind of hearing on the metropolitan stage” (16). Such narratives demonstrate an anxiety over the affective relationship between the British and the Irish and thus betray a sense that the union was not simply the rational and beneficial expedient that it was claimed to be. Writers such as James Hall, John Carr and Edward Wakefield, writing within the first decade and a half after the union, are distinctly uneasy especially when it comes to dealing with the 1798 rebellion. Anne Plumptre's Narrative of a Residence in Ireland (1817) is discomforted by competing Irelands as both a place of picturesque ruins and of potential violence. It seems that the best way to deal with Ireland was to see it in ethnographic terms as “outside modern historical time altogether” (30). Ireland was involved in an endless cycle of repetition rather than being on a road to progress. How could such a “strange anomaly” (31) enter into the temporality of the state?

There were other anxieties about Ireland, not the least of which was the apparent threat of its exponential population growth. The cabins of the Irish poor were extremely perplexing places for travel writers. They seemed to betoken “primitive undifferentiation and excess” and yet they were also places of “surprising reserve and decorum” (35). Writers were “astonished at the way in which an apparently insalubrious environment produced robust and modest beings” (36).

The limitations of the travel narrative, according to Ferris, were that the traveler was never really affected by the journey: “authorial enunciation may be discomforted but it is not really discomfited” (45). The Anglo-Irish national tale, however, moves the traveler inside the tale itself. National tales depend on “a migratory impulse through which contending cultures may come into contact” (47). They attempt to complete the union, advocating Catholic emancipation and reconciliation between the Irish and English, usually through a national marriage. But, especially in the case of Morgan, they also articulate grievances. Ireland is now a claim “that demands to be heard” (50). Thus for Ferris, Glorvina, in The Wild Irish Girl, is a much more provocative figure than she is for Corbett. She defies a nostalgic role for herself: “she reads English newspapers, quotes in Italian, declares ‘Milesian pride’ fatal to the community, and claims that Catholic Emancipation will reduce ‘superstition’ (56).” She is thus “the romantic figure of encounter, which offers precisely neither fusion nor survey but the uncertainty of a meeting” (56).

Ferris argues that Morgan changes in her later, more feminist novels, abandoning the family as a trope for national order and creating self-aware, almost estranged, nonconjugal heroines. The identity of the heroine of Florence Macarthy (1818) seems constantly open to revision. In The O'Briens and the O'Flahertys (1827) Morgan creates the intriguing figure of Beavoin O'Flaherty. “A modern cosmopolitan raised on the Continent, she is also an Irish native with roots in Gaelic female culture; a nun in an ancient patriarchal institution, she uses its resources to teach modern liberal ideas to local girls” (81). The hybridity of Morgan's heroines is an index of the complexity of the colonial situation. Beavoin's study is decorated with pictures of historical women who intervened in public affairs. It is thus not a place for fostering subjectivity so much as for planning public engagement.

Whereas the national tale produces the emotion of sympathy, Ferris sees Protestant Gothic as producing the shudder of recognition of the effects of another time in the present. “Maturin's dark romance thus releases a negativity that potentially inhered in the national tale form the outset” (126). Ultimately, however, Ferris sees the national tale, which had turned the Irish “case” into a “claim,” giving way in the 1820s to novels of insurgency by those, such as the Catholic Banim brothers, whose “demand” is for Catholic Emancipation. Demand is reinforced by the threat of insurrection: “The novels of 1798 thus summon the past, specifically the insurrection, to enforce a present demand” (139). John Banim's anonymously published The Anglo-Irish of the Nineteenth Century (1828) thus “rewrites the national tale as a refusal of the very cultural category that had enabled the genre: the hyphenated Anglo-Irish” (149). The Anglo-Irish themselves become the objects of ethnographic study as an archaic class bypassed by the new Catholic nation, which was being galvanized by the political campaigns of Daniel O'Connell. “Presenting the Anglo-Irish as an anachronism in the modern [O']Connellite nation wherein lies the Irish future, he sets out to bring them within the new national union; a union only tenuously and ambivalently located within the larger Union that O'Connell himself would seek to repudiate” (152).

Ferris's book has much to commend it and in its focus on Ireland complements Corbett's work which looks to England. The genre of the national tale has previously been the subject of a good deal of critical attention. Ferris's contribution is to place it in terms of the development of genres, to see it as a response to travel writing and as being transformed both into gothic and also, most interestingly, into the Catholic fiction of the Banims in the 1820s. Scholars have previously speculated on the reasons why both Morgan and Edgeworth effectively gave up writing about Ireland in fiction by the 1820s and have generally answered in terms of the changed political climate of the time. Ferris traces the same development but in terms of genre.

Margot Gayle Backus's The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order is a panoramic survey of Irish literature over three centuries. She is interested in tracing the dominance of the public, heterosexual man and its relationship with what she calls the gothic family romance. For her “the gothic can be approached as a virtual compendium of the unauthorized margins of modernity's mutating dominant order” (15) which is the Enlightenment. The notion of the family romance is borrowed from Freud. The gothic family romance is designed “to reincorporate denied feelings, perceptions and experiences within a story that simultaneously rationalizes them and categorically denies their relationship to the family” (109). She sees the gothic family romance as important in the Irish context because the Anglo-Irish “settler colonial family relied on the suppression of its origins for its coherence” (19). She traces the development of the patriarchal, nuclear family through a reading of Richardson's Clarissa before reaching the Anglo-Irish and their literature. For Backus the position of the Anglo-Irish as colonizers “precluded their acquisition of a coherent cultural identity” (76). Central to her book is the assertion that “the Anglo-Irish child is responsible for upholding an irrational belief in the legitimacy of the family's claim to land and power in Ireland” (88).

She explores this theme initially through readings of the work of Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke, and Maria Edgeworth, all of whom adopt an ironic stance when discussing the family. Like Corbett, Backus draws attention to the link in Burke's thinking between the patriarchal family and civil society. She also highlights the significance of Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent. Edgeworth and her father were attempting “to rationalize and Anglicize Ireland, and to invent within literature a plausible Irish identity and history for the Anglo-Irish” (97). Yet for Backus the novel produced “an allegorical nation-as-family that has continued to shape gothic representation in Ireland” (98). She links Edgeworth's apparent rationalism with the romanticism of her antiquarian contemporaries who are also embroiled in the gothic nexus. Backus sees Edgeworth in Castle Rackrent as placing the Anglo-Irish under that narrative scrutiny which antiquarians had reserved for the native Irish, a development which, as we have seen, Ferris holds occurred in the 1820s in the novels of the bourgeois, Catholic Banims.

At the center of Backus's work is a special instance of the Anglo-Irish gothic family romance which she calls Anglo-Irish paranoid gothic and which is more generally called Protestant Gothic, as in Ferris's usage. One of the greatest strengths of Backus's book is her attempt to integrate the Protestant Gothic into a wider literary and cultural tradition, rather than to see it in a kind of isolated genre, as has hitherto largely been the case. She sees the presence of the supernatural in Anglo-Irish paranoid gothic as being a coping mechanism for the disfunction of the family. The vampire myth is therefore a convenient substitute for the recognition of possible sexual transgression within the family. Thus Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) “was situating vampirism, cannibalism and parasitism nearly everywhere but Ireland and projecting blame for the resulting carnage onto the Catholic Church” (110). Encounters with the gothic in the works of Maturin, Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, and Bram Stoker begin with the onset of maturity and the prospect of marriage. Behind them all Backus detects the continuing problem of Anglo-Irish legitimacy which she sees as being at the heart of the Anglo-Irish gothic family romance, “an intergenerational familial compact in which the vitality of the living is sacrificed to the aims and requirements of the dead” (112).

The notion of child sacrifice is an important one for Backus, as can be seen by its inclusion in the subtitle of her book. By “child sacrifice” I take it that she means, in a symbolic sense, that each succeeding generation of an Anglo-Irish family had to be sacrificed to the need of the family to maintain its continuity and always threatened sense of legitimacy. As a literary trope entailing such a meaning actual child sacrifice is to my mind perhaps not overwhelmingly obvious from Anglo-Irish literature. Backus argues for its presence in Melmoth the Wanderer, though it turns out to be mostly in the already symbolic sense of parents “sacrificing” their children to life in a monastery or to a loveless marriage. This allows her just about to sustain the following reading of “Monçada's story,” an autonomous narrative embedded within Melmoth the Wanderer, in which a young Spaniard is asked to enter a monastery in order to atone for the sexual incontinence of his mother which produced him. The characteristic vigor of Backus's reading is both admirable and also typical of a work whose strength of argument and conviction concerning allegorical readings sometimes overshadows the texts under consideration:

Backus next turns her attention to LeFanu's novella “Carmilla” (1872). The family of the principal character, Laura, is like an Anglo-Irish one. She is “English” but lives in Styria in cultural isolation. Laura's violation by the lesbian vampire, Carmilla, who bears an uncanny resemblance to one of her ancestors is seen by Backus as typical of themes of homoeroticism and incest which pervade Anglo-Irish writing: “‘Carmilla's’ emphasis on the transgressiveness of homosexual desire serves as a screen for the routine sexual violation of children within the heteronormative family” (127). Laura remembers with horror Carmilla's visits to her as a child but as a young woman now rather desires her violation. LeFanu thus inscribes “within a lesbian love affair connections between childhood sexual encroachment and adult identity formation and object choice within the Anglo-Irish family” (133).

Backus gives extensive readings of twentieth-century literature that she sees in terms of a more consciously self-aware and subversive gothic realism. The last major work of paranoid gothic with which she deals, however, is Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), which is also the subject of the next book considered here. Fear of homosexuality and of female sexuality are at the heart of the novel. Lucy Westenra receives three marriage proposals and wonders why she cannot have three husbands: “a female protagonist breaches stringent restrictions governing female sexuality, is increasingly confined within the domestic sphere, and finds herself, as a result of her resistance to that confinement, cast into a world of alterity” (137) through being identified as a vampire. She combines images of both virgin and vampire and thus becomes the shadow side of the bourgeois woman. Vampires are also a trope of capitalism as they build “a transnational web of power relations” (140).

Backus's work has extraordinary energy yet I am left with a certain uneasiness about three matters, two of which, the claimed centrality of child sacrifice and the tendency of allegorical readings to overwhelm texts, I have already mentioned. My third cause for concern is the assumption of a persistent Anglo-Irish guilt about their possession of the land. In Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (1995) Terry Eagleton certainly made the case for seeing the Anglo-Irish as having failed to establish an hegemony in Ireland and, indeed, their loss of the land at the end of the nineteenth century would seem to confirm this. Yet it is important not to see that loss as necessarily fated from the beginning. Things might have been different. Kevin Whelan, in The Tree of Liberty (1996), has shown that the process by which the Catholic peasantry came to believe that they ought to possess the land as the aboriginal owners was a complex one, involving the taking up of a claim which had been abandoned by the Catholic ex-gentry. The Anglo-Irish attitude to the land must surely also have gone through a process of historical development and yet The Gothic Family Romance leaves one with the impression of one settled attitude which was transmitted down the generations.

In Dracula's Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness and the Question of Blood, Joseph Valente sets himself the challenge of reading Dracula as a radical critique of the structures of class, empire, and gender of the time rather than, as has hitherto been assumed, a conservative defense of them. He proposes to read the novel in terms of what he calls “its metrocolonial conditions of production” (3), by someone who was both metropolitan insider and colonial outsider. Pace those who see the novel as expressing a racialist panic Valente asserts that Stoker's real target is “racialized anxiety itself” (5). The novel is a modernist text and Stoker himself is ironic rather than enthusiastic about the novel's putative heroes. Stoker is trying “to break with the pervasive blood consciousness of fin de siécle Britain as a means of allaying the status anxiety he had long suffered on its account” (11).

Ironically, for a work which is critiquing the concept of race, Valente is keen to stress the importance of Stoker's partial ancestry in “Celtic stock” (16) as an explanation for his assertion that Stoker's outlook was not simply or typically Anglo-Irish. Valente is surely right though in concluding that in his working career in London, Stoker must have been aware that he was classified as Irish and was thus to a degree an outsider. As others have done Valente likens Stoker's Transylvania to Ireland; here, however, in terms of “the opacity, the hybridity, and the self-alterity” (53) of Ireland. Dracula who is rejuvinated by his vampirism is as Mother Ireland who becomes young and beautiful again through the blood sacrifice of Irish rebels. Valente astutely argues that Dracula himself can represent various sides in Ireland, both the landlords and the peasants, and, indeed, as a primitive, diseased, and invading force in England—even Irish immigrants in Britain.

In the cartoon war of the late nineteenth century both Britain and Ireland were presented as being vampires. “Stoker entertains the popular association of Irishness with social inferiority for the express purpose of disrupting the logic of essentialism whereby such an association might be sustained” (67). Dracula is not so much a foreign immigrant into Britain as, like the Irish, an ethnic arriviste. When Jonathan Harker sees him in London he is shocked by how the count seems to fit in. Dracula elicits anxieties then current within imperial Britain itself over “the coexistence of mutually uneasy ethnic communities” (76). Valente goes on to argue that there is more in common between Dracula and the Englishmen who oppose him, whom he somewhat patronizingly labels Little England, than might be supposed. Dracula's activities as a vampire create not hybrids but his own kind. In his own terms he creates the sort of “blood purity and racial hegemony” (82) which his English enemies themselves prize. The count becomes a reproach to the “contemporary blood consciousness” (83) of Stoker's times.

Part of the complexity of the relationship between colonizer and colonized, vampire and victim is “the simultaneous partnership and polarization between violator and violated” (84). Dracula is in many ways the double of Jonathan Harker; Dracula is “a disturbing projection of Harker's unconscious fantasy life” (91). Dracula's consumption of the blood of Harker's wife, Mina Murray, whom Valente identifies as Irish, is the complement to Harker's marital assimilation of her ethnic identity. This may be stretching things. However, Valente is good at accounting for apparent deficiencies in the text. Thus the fact that Transylvania is not full of Dracula-created vampires and that, while in England, Dracula focuses his attentions on Harker and his friends are read as indications that Dracula is best seen as their own fantasy projection. Indeed, when some of them enter the room where Dracula is attacking Murray they recognize him at once, even though they have never seen him before and he is turned away from them.

Valente draws attention to the correspondences between Dracula and Van Helsing who helps the Englishmen against him. He makes much of the fact that Van Helsing is a Dutch Catholic, Irish Protestants looking to William of Orange, a Dutch Protetant, as their saviour. Both Dracula and Van Helsing have bushy eyebrows and are perceived as foreigners. Van Helsing does things which make matters worse for his friends: he fails to stake Westenra early on and endangers Murray by keeping her out of things. His effective collaboration with Dracula is a sign of “the madness at the heart of those hegemonic social and sexual regimes that he upholds” (111). The eventual staking of Westenra is “an act of violently erotic penetration,” not unlike “the phallic bite of the vampire” (111).

Valente's most fascinating argument centers around Mina Murray who develops something akin to a compassion for Dracula. She alone comes to see the link between Dracula and his English pursuers. Their efforts to destroy the vampire fail until they turn to her and connect with him through hypnotizing her. “Her secret sharing with the vampire, which registers a certain degree of identification, paradoxically breaks with, stands against, and finally defeats the egoistic agenda and racist ideology he advances” (132). The vampire represents not an external threat whether racial (the Irish) or moral (degeneracy) but “an inward racial attitude” (134). Valente sees the Englishmen who destroy Dracula as having to become Irish Catholics in order to do so, using crucifixes and sacred hosts and trusting in Murray who is likened to the Blessed Virgin. Instead of defeating “the vampire without (the racial other)” they vanquish “the vampire within (the racialist predisposition)” (136). Dracula's death is thus an anticlimax. He crumbles to dust because he has never been a substantial external threat at all. He has only ever been “an internally generated phantom” (139). The fact that Dracula's death is accompanied by that of the American, Quincy Morris, representing “the ethno-national group inheriting world-imperial domination from the British, suggests that a more broadly colonialist supremacism is at last emerging as the guilty attribute” (139). The novel ends with the Englishmen at last freed from the obsession with blood. They finally become real heroes by “letting go the racialist impetus of their manly ideal” (143).

Valente's book is a brave attempt to swim against most of the critical current which has seen Dracula as a conservative text. He has joined in with commentators such as Stephen A. Arata, Chris Morash, David Glover, and Seamus Deane who read the novel in Irish terms. His book is a good example of a work which moves well beyond a simplistic analysis of Ireland in colonial terms. Seeing Stoker's position as a “metrocolonial” one, he is able to argue for a radical agenda at work in the novel. In doing so though he attributes an extraordinary sophistication, whether conscious or unconscious, to Stoker's text. Though Valente does over-read at times, he also manages for the most part to convince.

The last book considered in this article, Colin Graham's Ideologies of Epic: Nation, Empire and Victorian Epic Poetry, breaks both from the concern with fiction and with the continuum from the national tale to the gothic novel which has linked the previous four books considered. However, like Valente, Graham is concerned with colonialism. Colin Graham's book is an attempt “to theorise the cultural politics of the epic poem” (1) using the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. He pays particular attention to the writers of Victorian epic poetry, such as Alfred Tennyson, Samuel Ferguson, and Edwin Arnold, though Ferguson will be the focus here. Graham's interest is in the close connection between concepts of epic and nation, a connection that he wishes to discomfort. “Monologism, the nation and the epic can … be understood as attempts to circumvent the ‘otherness’ inherent in the dialogicality of discourse” (15). There is a paradox, however, in the relationship between nation and empire. The late nineteenth-century nation underpinned imperialism, but imperialism forces the nation to acknowledge other nations: “in an empire a nation becomes locked into a dialogic relation with other cultures” (2). The cultural anxieties created by this tension are recognizable in Valente's portrait of the 1890s. The originality of Graham's work lies in his investigation of epic, so phobic to dialogism, within the uncomfortable context of empire, which is potentially open to it, for nations defend borders whereas empires open them up.

How will the national epic be hybridized within the context of empire? Graham believes that:

Graham's interest in the epic poem Congal (1872), by the cultural nationalist Sir Samuel Ferguson, lies in the fact that it “tries to elevate Ireland culturally without making an equivalent ‘political’ national statement” (20). As a result “Congal becomes a contradictory, nationally unstable text, usefully embodying many of the complications embedded in the relationship between Ireland and Britain, and making clearer still the position epic will have in a colonial cultural interchange” (20).

Yeats later believed that Ferguson's work was crucial for the emergence of a new sense of nationality and for an Irish canon of literature. Ferguson was a political unionist but a cultural nationalist, keen on Ireland's place in the empire but also keen for an English recognition of Ireland's cultural richness. Thus “Irish history and literature need to be written in an analogous way to English history and literature to become ‘adequate’; hence Congal always has to deploy a monologism which looks over its shoulder” (92–93). Ferguson has constantly to strain “to control the ‘national’ import of the epic poem, facing the seemingly impossible task of looking to England (and Tennyson) and Ireland at the same time” (94). Believing that Ireland could be a cultural reality without having to be a self-governing political reality involved Ferguson in attempting to write a national epic “devoid of national ideological content” (94).

Graham's approach to Congal stresses the ways in which Ferguson's complex and contradictory ambitions for it break down. At the heart of the poem is a struggle between Congal, king of Ulster, and Domnal, king of all Ireland. Graham argues against interpretations of the poem which allegorize it into the conflict between Ulster (Congal) and the rest of Ireland (Domnal) or even between Ireland (Congal) and Britain (Domnal). Rather he thinks that the poem is trying to present an entire Ireland but that its inner contradictions destroy the attempt. Congal's Ulster is pagan whereas the rest of Ireland is Christian and in preparing for battle Congal is joined by British allies: “the text seems to be drifting towards an engagement with the problem of Irish-British relations in terms of colonization and invasion (109)”. Fearful of this, Ferguson has Domnal remind his soldiers that they all “have arrived in Ireland at some traceable point in history” (110) and he uses pan-Celtic analogies to blur the distinction between Irish and British history.

In Congal a parity of cultures in the “British Isles” is thus achieved by celticising them all. Pace Tennyson who had decelticized King Arthur, Ferguson actually compares him adversely with Congal. Ireland can never be a mere colony of England because “they share a history which has been unnaturally divided and which therefore offers an opportunity to be reimagined as a ‘community’” (115). Yet, on the other hand, the poem insists that Congal's allies are foreign invaders and he is even made to feel badly about having to use them. So in spite of Ferguson's intentions “the North of Ireland distances itself from the rest; [and] the British appear hostile and ready to invade” (119). Graham concludes that “Congal is thus an embodiment of the monologic form set against a dialogic politics” (120).

Graham's work uses Bakhtin in a subtle and sophisticated way as part of an analysis of colonialism and imperialism. As with most of the other works of nineteenth-century Irish studies considered in this article, his book points to the hybridity of Irish experience and identity in relation to Britain, moving the debate about colonialism onto a new level. As Corbett notes, simple binaries are inadequate.

Graham points to the centrality of race and of the notion of the Celt in the nineteenth century in the mediation between Irish and British history and politics. The debate about Celticism was open to all comers. Valente, Backus, and Ferris show how gothic, which has had such currency generally in literary and cultural studies over the past twenty years, was in the Irish context a vital intramural means whereby the Anglo-Irish sought to deal with the emotional consequences of their position in Irish society. It is interesting, though, that Ferris should argue for gothic as a conscious rather than an unconscious strategy. The early nineteenth century world of which she and Corbett write was one in which reasonable solutions seemed possible to the tensions between competing identities within Ireland and to the unequal power relations between Ireland and Britain. This was not so by the end of the century when the stakes had grown much greater, as Graham and Valente show, and the Irish had become an increasingly problematic group to assimilate within the ideology of empire.