Placing ‘Irish’ and ‘Romanticism’ in the Same Frame: Prospects

Abstract

Many of us have spoken and written for some time about the implications for scholarship and teaching of a reconsideration of Ireland’s relationship to Romanticism, and the chapters in this collection represent a collective but nevertheless diversified approach to the subject. Their diversity mirrors the diversity of the subject itself, which extends across disciplines, genres, and theoretical and critical paradigms. Indeed, to speak of ‘Ireland and Romanticism’ (or ‘Romanticism and Ireland’, which is not quite the same) is significantly different from speaking of ‘Irish Romanticism’. The two (or three) sets of terms need to be in dialogue among themselves if we are henceforth to write what we mean by any of them now in the twenty-first century, when so much has changed historically, economically, culturally, and intellectually from the world we inhabited at the end of the previous one.