This chapter studies the way in which MacDonald’s twelve Scottish novels relate to some of the dominant genres of Scottish literature in the nineteenth century, such as the national tale and the Kailyard school. It also analyses how MacDonald negotiates the tensions between nationalism and universalism in his works, since his ‘Scotch clannishness [was] a most elastic material & [he thought] of it as only a rudimental form of love to all men’ (letter to J. G. Holland, 27 May 1871). Finally, some attention is devoted to Adela Cathcart. While not usually included in MacDonald’s Scottish novels, Adela Cathcart can actually be read as a variation on the national tale and thus show how MacDonald’s works could exemplify Cairns Craig’s notion of a projective nationalism, whose aim was to make Scotland the spiritual core of the British Empire.

‘The Irish Novel and Global Literary Culture’ takes a world literary systems approach to the study of the Irish novel. Drawing on Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters (1999), and the work of Mark McGurl, Sarah Brouillette, and others, it is argued that a literary system, understood transnationally, to some extent conditions literary production. Ireland provides a paradigmatic case here, initially in a European context, as a peripheral literature capable of capitalising on early twentieth century European cultural upheavals. Likewise, the post-Second World War consolidation of the United States as a new centre of literary culture provided a congenial environment for many Irish writers, a number of whom would be based, permanently or temporarily, in the country. In several instances, this can be connected to Irish literary novelists who have embraced popular generic forms, such as the crime novel, romance, and western.

‘Tales of the Peasantry and Famine’ finds the term ‘peasant’ to be both problematic in occluding the complexity of Irish rural society, and, at the same time, inescapable, with the Irish peasants recurring in Irish fiction throughout the nineteenth century. Peasants feature across a range of popular genres of the period, including the historical novel, such as John Banims’ Boyne Water (1826), the national tale, and in novels specifically about peasant life, of which the works of William Carleton provide the best-known examples. The Famine of the 1840s accelerated this interest in Irish peasant culture as a disappearing world, as the numbers of the rural poor were decimated by hunger, disease, and emigration, also giving rise to a series of novels focusing on the Famine itself, notably Carleton’s Black Prophet (1847). By the end of the century, Emily Lawless’ Hurrish (1886) would treat the pre-Famine period as a lost time.

‘The National Tale’ argues that we ought to consider the national tale to be a mode, rather than a genre, in that the former can operate across genres and forms (literary and non-literary). From this perspective, the national tale is a literary mode in which problems of national identity and political sovereignty are narrativised in a form that produces a solution. The intermarriage of coloniser and colonised that is found in national tales in the romance mode, notably those of Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), and especially her Wild Irish Girl (1806), provides a familiar instance. Equally, there are national tales that function within the genres of the historical novel and of the Gothic novel. Across these generic forms, the national tale often encodes a resistance to the modern nation-state but, in so doing, exposes the impossibility of solving the problems of sovereignty and autonomy that they identify.

Chapter 5 explores the conspicuous absence of a Romantic Welsh national novel patterned after the fictions of Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott. Reading over a dozen “failed” attempts at producing such books, the chapter argues that the unique position of Wales did not furnish it with the materials necessary for a conventional bardic nationalist novel. Edgeworth’s and Scott’s spectacular commodification of national cultural difference could not be made to work in the Welsh case. Where Edgeworth’s Irish and Scott’s Scottish trade politically independent but doomed identities for a cultural nationalism that is, above all, reconcilable with a capacious imperial Britishness, the Welsh had no such option, since Welshness was and had been synonymous with (ancient) Britishness for centuries. What was at stake in Welsh national fictions was instead the definition of Britishness itself.

This chapter aims to enrich understanding of the production and reception of imperial discourses within the popular cultural imagination of romantic-era Ireland. It explores the ways in which popular fiction of the romantic period reflects and refashions the complex dynamic between British imperialism in the East and a nascent Irish nationalism. Whereas previous research in this area has centred upon the political, historical, and theoretical implications of Ireland’s imperial status, this chapter asserts that Ireland’s imperial role was both imagined and actualised within Irish popular culture via a diverse community of writers and readers. Taking the passing of the Act of Union as its departure point, it draws on a range of lesser-known and neglected texts, including a number of Minerva Press publications, in order to illustrate how popular fiction helped to cultivate and contest the intertwined discourses of union and empire within the political hothouse of post-Union Ireland.

This chapter examines the relationship between Irish Anglophone literature and Anglophone literatures elsewhere in the British Isles in the era of Union. The prominence of Irish literature in the creation of cultural memory which presented complex and remote events in simple terms – particularly accessible and portable to the diaspora, who aligned the language of deprivation and struggle with their own experiences of famine and poverty – is understood as a central part of this process. In historicising Irish literature in English in the romantic era, this chapter challenges the overlaid interpretations of Irish nationalist cultural memory in querying if it makes sense to speak of a distinct Anglophone Irish literature in English and a distinct Irish cultural and social history in this period, asking in what Irish claims to distinctiveness rested at the time. It concludes that we need to understand Irish culture and literature in more archipelagic and intercultural terms, and that the politics of the Union era themselves and Ireland’s exposure to the allegedly ‘enlightened’ and ‘universal’ norms of British imperial administration served to crystallise the memorialisation of Irish difference which in the end came to underpin the concept of a separate Irish Anglophone culture and literature.

Lady Morgan’s celebrity has come to be defined by her aptitude for self-fashioning, as she embodied her fictional heroine Glorvina for an enraptured English readership. Morgan’s self-conscious representation of herself in her Memoirs (1862) as ‘the poor butt that reviewers, editors and critics have set up’ suggests an equally acute awareness of her literary reception and legacy. Taking these notions of literary celebrity and self-fashioning as its starting point, this chapter focuses on Morgan’s national tales, arguing that her writing provides a self-conscious account of the cultural circulation of Irish identity. Morgan’s layering of multiple genres and discourses in her national tales indicates a writer deeply engaged with processes of both cultural and literary transition and the chapter suggests that this engagement is best understood through Morgan’s fictional appraisal of Enlightenment philosophical constructions of history and nation. In their alertness to the politics of sympathy and the performance of national suffering, the novels construct Ireland as a site of multiple and competing modes of perception and representation. In doing so, they reveal Morgan as a self-conscious reviser of form who both registers and shapes the dynamic literary transitions taking place during the romantic period.