Book contents
- Irish Literature in Transition, 1780–1830
- Irish Literature in Transition
- Irish Literature in Transition, 1780–1830
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Series Preface
- General Acknowledgements
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Origins
- Part II Transitions
- Part III Reputations
- Chapter 8 Placing Mary Tighe in Irish Literary History: From Manuscript Culture to Print
- Chapter 9 Edgeworth and Realism
- Chapter 10 Lady Morgan and ‘the babbling page of history’: Cultural Transition as Performance in the Irish National Tale
- Chapter 11 ‘The diabolical eloquence of horror’: Maturin’s Wanderings
- Chapter 12 English Ireland/Irish Ireland: the Poetry and Translations of J. J. Callanan
- Chapter 13 Thomas Moore and the Social Life of Forms
- Chapter 14 ‘English, Irished’: Union and Violence in the Fiction of John and Michael Banim
- Chapter 15 The Transition of Reputation: Gerald Griffin
- Chapter 16 William Maginn: the Cork Correspondent
- Part IV Futures
- Index
Chapter 14 - ‘English, Irished’: Union and Violence in the Fiction of John and Michael Banim
from Part III - Reputations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2020
- Irish Literature in Transition, 1780–1830
- Irish Literature in Transition
- Irish Literature in Transition, 1780–1830
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Series Preface
- General Acknowledgements
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Origins
- Part II Transitions
- Part III Reputations
- Chapter 8 Placing Mary Tighe in Irish Literary History: From Manuscript Culture to Print
- Chapter 9 Edgeworth and Realism
- Chapter 10 Lady Morgan and ‘the babbling page of history’: Cultural Transition as Performance in the Irish National Tale
- Chapter 11 ‘The diabolical eloquence of horror’: Maturin’s Wanderings
- Chapter 12 English Ireland/Irish Ireland: the Poetry and Translations of J. J. Callanan
- Chapter 13 Thomas Moore and the Social Life of Forms
- Chapter 14 ‘English, Irished’: Union and Violence in the Fiction of John and Michael Banim
- Chapter 15 The Transition of Reputation: Gerald Griffin
- Chapter 16 William Maginn: the Cork Correspondent
- Part IV Futures
- Index
Summary
Throughout the Banims’ fiction, violence is presented as forcing a strange unity, a troubled merging of identities. If the Act of Union is a rough stitching together of nations, it is precisely with this uneven stitchwork that the Banims concern themselves, giving voice to a fragile post-Union Irish identity. Those elements of the Banims’ work that have confounded critics or irritated readers – the multiple voices, the shifting discourses, the bewildering degree of detail – might be understood as what Slavoj Žižek calls the truthfulness of their rendering of violence, truthful in their ability to induct readers into alternative ways of seeing or knowing. Violence is present not simply at the level of content but in the narrative form, pocked and scored by the collision of English and Irish languages, and the clash between written and oral cultures. Characters lacking any stable sense of self inhabit tales without clear purpose or form, but that weakness is also their strength. The problem of violence is translated into possibility, as these texts break with conventional ideas about self and word, identity and language.
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- Irish Literature in Transition, 1780–1830 , pp. 273 - 291Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020