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Title: From Clonmel to Peru: Barbarism and Civility in Vertue Rewarded; Or, The Irish Princess (Critical Essay)
Author : Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies
Release Date : January 22, 2008
Genre: Reference,Books,
Pages : * pages
Size : 407 KB

Description

Vertue Rewarded; or, The Irish Princess (1693) is one of the earliest recorded works of Irish prose fiction in the English language. Published just two years after the victory of the Protestant armies of William III over the Catholic forces of James II, it is also one of the most complex contemporary fictions in English: a romance that welds a uniquely specific rendering of provincial Ireland, a detailed account of the Williamite military campaign of 1690, purported Irish folklore, and an interpolated South American tale into a complex reflection on contemporary colonial identity. This essay opens by considering the novel's contemporary setting in Clonmel, County Tipperary, in 1690, and the struggle between Williamite and Jacobite forces for military superiority before and during the first siege of Limerick in the summer of that year. Attention then turns to the work's two interpolated narratives: the story of Cluaneesha, allegedly taken from 'an ancient Irish Chronicle' and 'The Story of Faniaca' with its exotic South American setting. Two decades have passed since Michael McKeon argued that seventeenth-century novels characteristically draw on a variety of generic categories, including history and romance--an argument that now seems a commonplace of criticism of early English fiction. (1) The present essay reveals that Vertue Rewarded is an exceptionally dense interweaving of history, both Irish and Peruvian--the author demonstrably drawing in both cases on the most up-to-date sources--alongside romance, together with what purports to be genuine Gaelic folklore but which reveals itself, on closer examination, to be highly sophisticated fakelore. (2) This powerful if improbable generic mix, it is argued, results in a novel that offers a provocative critique of contemporary distinctions between 'civilization' and 'barbarism' used to underpin the colonial enterprise in Ireland and the Americas alike.