The Irish and the Imagination of Race: White Supremacy across the Atlantic in the Nineteenth Century

Front Cover
University of Virginia Press, Dec 20, 2023 - Literary Criticism - 324 pages

Honorable Mention—Lawrence J. McCaffrey Prize for Books on Irish-America

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.

 

Contents

Acknowledgments
19
NineteenthCentury Irishness and the Construction of Race
The Gothic Palimpsest of Black and Irish Histories
From Irish Bardicism to the White Nationalist Verse Epic
Irish American Whiteness in The Garies and Their Friends
John Mitchel and the Polemic of White Grievance
Performing Sympathy in The Octoroon
The Irish National Tale and Confederate Nostalgia
Bibliography
Index
Copyright

Other editions - View all

The Irish and the Imagination of Race: White Supremacy Across the Atlantic ...
Patrick R. O'Malley
No preview available - 2023
The Irish and the Imagination of Race: White Supremacy Across the Atlantic ...
Patrick R. O'Malley
No preview available - 2023

Common terms and phrases

abolition abolitionism abolitionist African American alignment American South Anti-Slavery argument asserts Black enslavement Black persons blackface British brutal Cambridge Carlyle Carlyle's Catholic Celt Celtic century chattel enslavement citizenship colonial context cultural Daniel O'Connell Dion Boucicault edited emancipation English enslaved Black epigraph explicitly fact Famine figures Frederick Douglass fundamental Garies genres Goddu Gold-Bug gothic Grayson Harriet Jacobs Hireling human Imagination Indian insists Ireland Irish American Irish and Black Irish nationalism Irish nationalist Irish whiteness Irishman italics in original Jacobs Jail Journal John Mitchel labor Last Conquest letter literary London Lost Cause Morrison narrative Negro nineteenth nineteenth-century Irish nonwhite novel Octoroon Oscar Wilde Ossian Oxford plantation play Poe's poem Poetry political race racial racist realism representation represents rhetorical Romantic Saxon sentiment slave slavery Southern speech suggests sympathy term Thomas tropes United University Press Victorian violence Webb Webb's white supremacy Wild Irish Girl writes York

Bibliographic information

TitleThe Irish and the Imagination of Race: White Supremacy across the Atlantic in the Nineteenth Century
AuthorPatrick R. O'Malley
PublisherUniversity of Virginia Press, 2023
ISBN0813950554, 9780813950556
Length324 pages
Subjects ›  › 

Literary Criticism / Subjects & Themes / General
  
Export CitationBiBTeX EndNote RefMan