Chapter 10 - ‘An Example to the Whole World’: Patriotism and Imperialism in Early Irish Fiction

Summary

Patriot sentiment in eighteenth-century Ireland often called upon imperial analogies in the articulation of its political vision. Despite its status as a sister kingdom, Ireland all too often appeared, as William Molyneux put it in his classic work of Irish patriotism, The Case of Ireland Stated (1698), to be viewed ‘only as a Colony from England’. Correspondingly, this chapter reads Irish fiction – from the anonymously published Vertue Rewarded (1693) to Charles Johnston’s The History of Arsaces, Prince of Betlis (1774) via selected works of Jonathan Swift – within a longue durée narrative of fictional and discursive evolution informed by analogous views of empire. In doing so, it suggests a complex imbrication of colonial and imperial concerns with other, better-recognised, issues of civility, ethnicity, and identity pertaining to Ireland. Such imaginative complexities, invoking global and historical comparisons with Spanish imperialism, the American War of Independence, and the early growth of the British empire in India (amongst others), are embodied in these fictions under the umbrella of the emerging patriotism characteristic of the Protestant Ascendancy.