Overview

This book analyzes the role of Irishness in nineteenth-century constructions of race and racialization, both in the British Isles and in the United States. Focusing on the years immediately preceding the American Civil War, Patrick O’Malley interrogates the bardic verse epic, the gothic tale, the realist novel, the stage melodrama, and the political polemic to ask how many mid-nineteenth-century Irish nationalist writers with liberationist politics declined to oppose race-based chattel enslavement in the United States and the structures of white supremacy that underpinned and ultimately outlived it. Many of the writers whose work O’Malley examines drew specifically upon the image of Black suffering to generate support for their arguments for Irish political enfranchisement; yet in doing so, they frequently misrepresented the fundamental differences between Irish and Black experience under the regimes of white supremacy, which has had profound consequences.

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9780813950570

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Reviews

An urgently needed and transformative intervention into the fields of Irish Studies, Victorian Studies, and American Studies. O'Malley provides a brilliant account of the relationship between Irish nationalism, Irish-American literary culture, and the consolidation of white supremacy in the US and in Britain. The stakes of this text are not only aesthetic but reveal the ways in which form and genre are key to understanding much larger political formations and forces. By the end of this rigorously argued book, the racial politics of Irish nationalism cannot be understood in the same way. --Amy E. Martin, Mount Holyoke College, author of Alter-nations: Nationalisms, Terror, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland

An urgently needed and transformative intervention into the fields of Irish Studies, Victorian Studies, and American Studies. O'Malley provides a brilliant account of the relationship between Irish nationalism, Irish-American literary culture, and the consolidation of white supremacy in the US and in Britain. The stakes of this text are not only aesthetic but reveal the ways in which form and genre are key to understanding much larger political formations and forces. By the end of this rigorously argued book, the racial politics of Irish nationalism cannot be understood in the same way. - Amy E. Martin, Mount Holyoke College, author of Alter-nations: Nationalisms, Terror, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland

Author Information

Patrick R. O’Malley is Professor of English at Georgetown University and the author of Liffey and Lethe: Paramnesiac History in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Ireland.

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