This chapter identifies the longstanding correspondence between the Anglo-Irish novelist, Maria Edgeworth, and the Jewish-American schoolteacher, Rachel Mordecai, as a transnational conduit of ecological inquiry. By teasing out the vagaries and idiosyncrasies of this transatlantic relationship (which lasted almost a quarter of a century), this chapter renders visible a minor tributary of transnational exchange that operated at the peripheries of the nineteenth century’s global power nexus. Both Edgeworth and Mordecai inhabited anomalous social positions and geographical locales, yet their shared ecological interests enabled them to contribute to wider channels of knowledge and experience in the period. Rather than celebrate their relationship as a triumph of lateral transnational exchange, however, the chapter exposes the complex power dynamics that simultaneously undergird and undermine their ecological collaboration. The correspondents’ mutual commitment to Enlightenment ecology may have engendered an invigorating intellectual exchange, but its limits and exclusions are witnessed most acutely in their nervous reflections upon slavery in the wake of the Nat Turner Rebellion of 1831. Even in its attempts to process and interpret Black resistance to slavery, their correspondence colludes to suppress the revolutionary potential of Turner’s alternative ecology.

Throughout Beckett’s later prose and drama, in Company, Stirrings Still, …but the clouds…, there emerges at key moments the figure of the back road. Beckett’s narrator imagines a character walking in a featureless place, ‘nowhere in particular on the way from A to Z’. But then he corrects himself. ‘Or say for verisimilitude the Ballyogan Road. That dear old back road’.

This re-emergence of the back road in late Beckett calls, at each occurrence, to an Irish tradition, that has always been secreted in Beckett’s writing, somewhere in the back of the mind, or the back of the page. This essay reads this back road, as it suggests a principle of historical and cultural transmission, by which Beckett reaches backwards trough a lineage of Irish writers who sit at an angle to their own historical moment, and forwards to writers who come after Beckett, and who seek to inherit his own particular Irish legacy. The back road, and the concept of the back more generally, is a recurrent concern for writers in this tradition, from Maria Edgeworth, to Elizabeth Bowen, to John Banville. In tracing the passage of the back road from Edgeworth to Banville, this essay at once summons a minor tradition to which all of these writers belong and suggests a means by which a minor tradition might be critically articulated.

The first chapter defines what was meant by ’caricature’ in Britain between the late seventeenth century and the early nineteenth century. I explain how the varied usage of ’caricature’ captured the richness of caricatúra’s connotations and etymology in Italian, discussing Giuseppe Baretti’s Italian–English Dictionary, Annibale Carracci’s ’perverse realism’ and the history of ritratti carichi and caricature drawing in Britain. I establish the full scope of carticature’s significance for literature and letters in the Romantic period, extricating the history of literature’s ’caricature’ from the ’golden age of caricature’ associated with the single-sheet satirical print genre. Extracts from the novels of Mary Brunton and Maria Edgeworth illustrate the literary sphere’s view of satirical prints, while quotations from books newspapers and periodicals exemplify the use and debate of ’caricature’ as a term in social and political critique as well as in criticism of literature and the arts.

The fifth chapter explores how concepts of caricature interacted with historical romance in the critical reception and writing of Walter Scott’s characters. I explore Scott’s association of pictorial caricature with accuracy, particularity and referentiality, looking in particular at The Heart of Mid-Lothian and Guy Mannering, and suggesting the implications of John Kay’s caricatures for Scott’s ’compendious realism’. Scott’s defences of historical ’caricature’ – in his essay on Tobias Smollett and in the Magnum Opus edition of The Monastery – are a counterpoint to the anti-caricature rhetoric used to disparage his novels. Returning to the realist device of the ’explained caricature’, I differentiate national caricatures of the Scots and Jewish ’body-corporate’ in Rob Roy, The Heart of Mid-Lothian and Ivanhoe.

The second chapter explores how literary writing in the Romantic period denies and decries caricature. I describe a ’caricature talk’, dominated by anti-caricature rhetoric, that seeks to establish the quality, verisimilitude and representational justice of textual characterisations; and I explore how caricature talk constitutes formal realism in the literary criticism of the Romantic period. The second part of the chapter positions imaginative literary caricature in relation to anxiety about prospographic and personal caricature describing real people, providing essential context for Chapter 3’s discussion of character originality and realism.

This chapter examines the relationship between excess and the ways that Romantic novels were envisioned as in – or out of – fashion. As industrial production ramped up in the early nineteenth century, supplying consumers with mass-produced luxuries of all types, so too was the popular novel conceptualized as a consumer good, an object to buy and display as much as a text to read. The chapter begins with Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, analysing the novel’s focus on fashion, advertising, work, and value. Moving forward to the 1810s, it then discusses several novels by Minerva author ‘Miss Byron’, among others, to demonstrate how authors used the idea of fashion to defend the novel and make visible the often-ignored labour of its authors. The excesses of overspending consumers become a metaphor for the glut of the literary market, while the notion of luxury as always created by someone’s work – but also as essentially commodified and interchangeable – implicates the novel in a commercial system that challenges the hierarchies of strictly literary valuations.

Chapter 4 interprets Austen’s beloved comedy of marriage in dialogue with Cavell’s philosophy of comic remarriage. In its first half I consider the charismatic art of Pride and Prejudice as a form of the conversational “sequel,” as Pride and Prejudice the cultural phenomenon comprises an unbounded event of uncontainable circulation and exchange. The chapter’s second half gives visibility to Cavell’s omission of the genealogy of the European concept of perfectibility from his Emersonian inflection of moral perfectionism. Cavell has never explicitly laid out or paid homage to the trajectory, tensions, and implications of perfectibility as a concept found in European philosophy and literature of the Enlightenment. The omission impacts a Cavellian reading of Pride and Prejudice by laying new stress on how Austen uses comic style to articulate her own fictional stance against the disembodiment and rhetorical rigidity of much thinking on “perfectibility” – especially Godwin’s. At the center of Jane Austen and Other Minds, the chapter enacts a hinge-movement regarding philosophy’s historical and material conditions and gender as topics of emergent interest in late Cavell.

Chapter 6 deals with the visiting card as a new form of social media that anticipates the text messaging of today, exploring how its novelty caught the attention of Horace Walpole and Samuel Johnson. As a genre that was particularly invested in the representation of social life, the novel is one of the most important sources for understanding the complexities of visiting in eighteenth-century social life and textual media that facilitated and recorded it. With reference to the novels of Jane Austen and, in particular, Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee (1812), I discuss how prose fiction adapted the capacity of visiting card and other kinds of ephemeral texts in order to realise the affective power of the intimate social encounter entailed in handing over one’s card. I argue that The Absentee is exceptional as a fiction that not only utilises the visiting card but also emulates ephemerology as the Enlightenment’s other science.

This chapter surveys the relationship between eighteenth-century Irish studies and Queer studies. It gives an important account of key approaches in Queer studies to eighteenth-century Irish literature and culture, as well as providing an overview of the current methodological debates in queer historiography, more broadly. As well as presenting readers with an ingress into queer Irish eighteenth-century studies, this chapter also intervenes in scholarly debates on how to account for queerness in the past. Focusing on three case studies, the chapter examines manifestations of queerness in the Anglophone long eighteenth century across the prose fiction and poetry of the satirist Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), the poet Charles Churchill (1731–1764), and the prolific writer and essayist Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849). From reading the erotic parameters of Swift’s Yahoos in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) to Churchill’s anti-Irish figure of the fribble which surfaced during the mid-century’s fraught Seven Years’ War debates, and then later, re-examining Edgeworth’s queer depiction of Harriet Freke in Belinda (1801), this chapter brings into sharp relief the fluid, and often contradictory, ways in which eighteenth-century ideas about Ireland and Irishness served to queer emerging norms of British colonial identity and culture.

Between 1780 and 1830, a highly distinctive body of imaginative writing emerged in Ireland, formed by and in turn helping to mould the linguistic, political, historical, and geographical divisions characteristic of Irish life. The intense and turbulent creative effort involved bore witness to a key transition at the beginning of the nineteenth century: the emergence of modern Irish literature as a distinct cultural category. During these years, Irish literature came to consist of a recognisable body of work, which later generations could draw on, quote, anthologise, and debate. This chapter offers a new map of the making of Irish literature in the romantic period, as well as introducing the aims of the volume as a whole.

Drawing on new archival research into book history, letters and periodical literature, this chapter explores the critical narratives around what it meant to be a woman writer between 1830 and 1880 via a focus on case studies of two Irish woman writers: Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849) and Mrs S. C. Hall (1800–1881). This focused approach allows a comprehensive placing of Irish women writers within the developing literary marketplace of their time and consideration of the extent to which the contemporary critical reception of their work has shaped subsequent scholarship. In doing so, the chapter uncovers a narrative of peaks and troughs, epitomised by periods of great esteem and critical disdain, and highlights the fluctuating patterns of visibility and invisibility of literary productions in the nineteenth century and beyond.

The question of realism helps us zero in on a certain puzzle about perhaps the most important Irish writer working in this important period of transition. On the face of it, Edgeworth’s relation to anything called fictional realism might seem distant. Her narratives often tend to allegory and didacticism; they tend to be highly reflexive; she often adapts or incorporates non-realist genres, such as the fairy tale or legend; and, for some critics, she belongs to an Irish tradition in which realism is thought to be impossible on social and cultural grounds. And yet Edgeworth was a leading influence on the two British novelists – Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen – who, in their contrasting ways, are often considered as key figures in the shaping of the modern realist novel. This chapter develops a solution to this puzzle by identifying Edgeworth with ‘scientific realism’, and showing that she shaped a distinctive kind of fictional practice out of her well-established commitments to experiment, observation, and the inductive method.

This chapter considers the transatlantic influences that shaped Irish literary culture in the romantic period. In particular, it focuses on two understudied phenomena. First, the chapter provides an account of texts published in Ireland that concern African slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, written by pro-slavery sympathisers, white abolitionists, and writers of African descent like Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano. Second, it zeroes in on a forgotten Irish novel, Sarah Isdell’s The Vale of Louisiana, published in Dublin in 1805, which dramatises the transatlantic, trans-Caribbean travels of an English family, addresses slavery directly, and borrows heavily from a canonical early American novel, Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798). The chapter concludes on the other side of the ‘steep Atlantic’, as Sydney Owenson called it, and briefly addresses the publication and reception of Irish writers in the early United States, especially Thomas Moore and Maria Edgeworth, where they found an unpredictable and productive future.

Chapter 4 reveals the extent of Maria Edgeworth's participation in a form of networked authorship borne out in interactions with her family, previous texts, reviewers, and readers, which can be discerned within her revisions to four of her major novels: Belinda (1801), Patronage (1814), Harrington (1817), and Helen (1834).Her post-publication revisions to Belinda and Patronage are linked, especially in the case of the latter, to her interest in scientific and scholarly knowledge and her struggle to moderate her didactic moralism.This book discusses, for the first time, an early fragmentary version of Harrington, which contained an anti-semitic first-person narrator, which was removed before publication.Edgeworth’s published version was a departure from her usual didacticism, which she attenuated once more in the 1825 edition.Her final novel Helen and her unfinished fiction Take for Granted attest to, perhaps more than any other novels in this project, their collaborative origins: they were influenced by her family and her readers at all stages of the composition process.