Lady Morgan in Italy: A Traveller with an Agenda

Lady Morgan (née Sydney Owenson) was a professional Irish travellerand travel-writer, who spent over a year on the peninsula. The travelogueItaly (1821) she was commissioned to write on the basis of the reputationshe had acquired as a novelist (e.g. The Wild Irish Girl, 1806) anda socio-political writer (France, 1817), left a mark on Italy and on theunderstanding of Italy in Great Britain. Her writings, in fact, helpeddisseminate the ideal of a unified Italy and influence British and Irishpublic opinion in favour of Italy’s aspirations to cast off foreign or domesticautocratic rule. Moreover, she used her travelogue to serve thecause of Ireland disguising a patriotic message about her home countryunder her many sallies about nationalism and the right to self-determinationconcerning Italy. The political impact of her book, unusualfor a travel account written by a woman, was enhanced by Morgan’sradical ideology, the gender bias of her observations and her originalmethods. The present article purposes to examine Morgan’s double,feminine and masculine, approach of mixing solid documentation withapparently frivolous notes originating in the feminine domain of societynews, commentary on the domestic scene and emotional reporting onsocial and historical events. Distrusting male-authored official history,Morgan gave a central place in her work to the informal sources fromwhich she gathered her insights about Italy. Analysing how she came toobtain the contemporary input for elaborating her ideas will be the aimof this chapter which will dwell on the more worldly aspects of Morgan’ssojourn in the peninsula focussing on the company she kept, theactivities she partook of, the events of a domestic nature she witnessed

“Our revenge will be to survive”: Two Irish Narrations of the Armenian Genocide

The 1915-1922 Armenian Genocide has been the subject of memoirs and historical accounts, most of them written by diasporic Armenians, but, unlike the Shoah, has not inspired much creative literature. It is therefore the more surprising that the latest fictional accounts should come from Ireland. Anyush (2014), the novel of Limerick-born Martine Madden, and a film called The Promise (2015) by the Irish director Terry George, both tell moving and impossible love stories which are a thin pretext for eliciting empathy for the sufferings of the Armenians and fighting the lack of recognition of the genocide. While giving a graphic description of the abuses at the hands of Turkish soldiers and of the nightmarish journey of the deportees starved to death, decimated by epidemics and herded through mountains and deserts with no precise destination except death, the two authors evoke memories of similar past and present actions in the world intended to annihilate an ethnic group with its language and culture. Writing about one group resonates against the histories of the others, in a sort of mise en abyme of blind human violence and ethnic hatred. The interest of Madden and George in the historical facts concerning this large Christian minority of the Ottoman Empire, much as it was inspired by compassion and a desire to denounce this still unrecognized massacre, may be due to a special sensitivity to the suppression of identity linked to a nationalist reading of the history of Ireland and more particularly of the Great Famine

Lady Morgan and Thomas Moore : Irish perceptions of Italy and the uses of national images in the nineteenth century

Constructions of diversity are dictated by epistemological and political reasons and have different uses at different times. Literary Italy does not correspond to a geopolitical entity but is a construction based as much on what has been written about it as on what people have seen. The 'madein- Ireland' Italy that reached the Romantic writers of the first half of the nineteenth century was a composite construction reflecting conflicting loyalties since it comprised on the one hand the stereotypes inherited from the Ascendancy tradition and on the other images of Italy as bearing a special relationship to Ireland.' Indeed, the epistemological and political reasons for constructing an image of Italy in Ireland at the beginning of the 19th century were quite special and, as to the past, what had been experienced and written by the English about Italy did not totally coincide with what had been experienced and written by the Irish. [excerpt]peer-reviewe

“Our revenge will be to survive”: Two Irish Narrations of the Armenian Genocide

The 1915-1922 Armenian Genocide has been the subject of memoirs and historical accounts, most of them written by diasporic Armenians, but, unlike the Shoah, has not inspired much creative literature. It is therefore the more surprising that the latest fictional accounts should come from Ireland. Anyush (2014), the novel of Limerick-born Martine Madden, and a film called The Promise (2015) by the Irish director Terry George, both tell moving and impossible love stories which are a thin pretext for eliciting empathy for the sufferings of the Armenians and fighting the lack of recognition of the genocide. While giving a graphic description of the abuses at the hands of Turkish soldiers and of the nightmarish journey of the deportees starved to death, decimated by epidemics and herded through mountains and deserts with no precise destination except death, the two authors evoke memories of similar past and present actions in the world intended to annihilate an ethnic group with its language and culture. Writing about one group resonates against the histories of the others, in a sort of mise en abyme of blind human violence and ethnic hatred. The interest of Madden and George in the historical facts concerning this large Christian minority of the Ottoman Empire, much as it was inspired by compassion and a desire to denounce this still unrecognized massacre, may be due to a special sensitivity to the suppression of identity linked to a nationalist reading of the history of Ireland and more particularly of the Great Famine

Italia Mia: Irish-European Entanglements in the Nineteenth Century

AAV