This chapter aims to enrich understanding of the production and reception of imperial discourses within the popular cultural imagination of romantic-era Ireland. It explores the ways in which popular fiction of the romantic period reflects and refashions the complex dynamic between British imperialism in the East and a nascent Irish nationalism. Whereas previous research in this area has centred upon the political, historical, and theoretical implications of Ireland’s imperial status, this chapter asserts that Ireland’s imperial role was both imagined and actualised within Irish popular culture via a diverse community of writers and readers. Taking the passing of the Act of Union as its departure point, it draws on a range of lesser-known and neglected texts, including a number of Minerva Press publications, in order to illustrate how popular fiction helped to cultivate and contest the intertwined discourses of union and empire within the political hothouse of post-Union Ireland.

This chapter examines the relationship between Irish Anglophone literature and Anglophone literatures elsewhere in the British Isles in the era of Union. The prominence of Irish literature in the creation of cultural memory which presented complex and remote events in simple terms – particularly accessible and portable to the diaspora, who aligned the language of deprivation and struggle with their own experiences of famine and poverty – is understood as a central part of this process. In historicising Irish literature in English in the romantic era, this chapter challenges the overlaid interpretations of Irish nationalist cultural memory in querying if it makes sense to speak of a distinct Anglophone Irish literature in English and a distinct Irish cultural and social history in this period, asking in what Irish claims to distinctiveness rested at the time. It concludes that we need to understand Irish culture and literature in more archipelagic and intercultural terms, and that the politics of the Union era themselves and Ireland’s exposure to the allegedly ‘enlightened’ and ‘universal’ norms of British imperial administration served to crystallise the memorialisation of Irish difference which in the end came to underpin the concept of a separate Irish Anglophone culture and literature.

Lady Morgan’s celebrity has come to be defined by her aptitude for self-fashioning, as she embodied her fictional heroine Glorvina for an enraptured English readership. Morgan’s self-conscious representation of herself in her Memoirs (1862) as ‘the poor butt that reviewers, editors and critics have set up’ suggests an equally acute awareness of her literary reception and legacy. Taking these notions of literary celebrity and self-fashioning as its starting point, this chapter focuses on Morgan’s national tales, arguing that her writing provides a self-conscious account of the cultural circulation of Irish identity. Morgan’s layering of multiple genres and discourses in her national tales indicates a writer deeply engaged with processes of both cultural and literary transition and the chapter suggests that this engagement is best understood through Morgan’s fictional appraisal of Enlightenment philosophical constructions of history and nation. In their alertness to the politics of sympathy and the performance of national suffering, the novels construct Ireland as a site of multiple and competing modes of perception and representation. In doing so, they reveal Morgan as a self-conscious reviser of form who both registers and shapes the dynamic literary transitions taking place during the romantic period.