One of the Principal Nations in Europe: The Representation of Ireland in Sarah Butler’s Irish Tales
Ian Campbell Ross, Trinity College
Volume 7, no. 1, October 1994
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
Among the many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century accounts of Ireland by English writers, one of the most influential in shaping English perceptions of the neighbouring island and its people was Sir James Ware’s Histories of Ireland, published in Dublin in 1633. Sir James Ware (1594-1666), member of parliament for the University of Dublin, Auditor-General of Ireland, and one of the most significant figures in Irish historiography, printed Edmund Spenser’s A View of the State of Ireland, Meredith Hanmer’s Chronicle of Ireland, another Chronicle of Ireland by Henry Marleburrough [sic], and The History of Ireland by the Jesuit Edmund Campion. Ware was a notable apologist for contemporary Ireland and removed many of the more offensive references to the country from the texts he printed. Inevitably, however, he was forced to acknowledge the frequently negative view of Ireland and its refractory inhabitants his authors shared.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Ireland” include:
The Catholic Question, Print Media, and John O’Keeffe’s The Poor Soldier (1783)
by HELEN M. BURKE (ECF 27.3-4, Spring-Summer 2015)
“Fitted to the Humour of the Age”: Alteration and Print in Swift’s A Tale of a Tub
by KATIE LANNING (ECF 26.4, Summer 2014)
Castle Stopgap: Historical Reality, Literary Realism, and Oral Culture
by KATHERINE O’DONNELL (ECF 22.1, Fall 2009)
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