Supranations: Writing the Irish and Scottish subjects in the Atlantic world, 1763--1855

Supranations: Writing the Irish and Scottish Subjects in the Atlantic World, 1763-1855, offers an alternate history of Irish and Scottish "national" literatures in the long Romantic period. It argues for a new understanding of the complex tensions between what are often read as competing desires---for national autonomy or identity and for transnational affiliation. I claim that within Irish and Scottish literatures a distinct strain of "supranational" writing emerged. By supranational writing I mean an aesthetics that imagined national specificity in the context of forces that worked beyond the nation, such as globalized free markets, migration, and the spread of universal rights discourses. I thus trace literary representations of national identity not only within Ireland and Scotland but also beyond these nations' geographical boundaries, in England, the United States, and Central America. My readings of this transatlantic archive---comprised of popular song collections, newspapers, drama, and novels---outline a previously obscure trajectory in literary history. They also reveal the supranational content in the canonical "national" literatures of Ireland and Scotland and make visible traces of the Irish and Scottish supranationals in American and English literatures. Of course, Irish and Scottish supranational literatures assumed quite different forms due to the countries' different political, economic and social situations. Each developed as inhabitants of the two geographical spaces moved from regional to national identities, from national identities to being part of the Union with England, and from being part of the Union to belonging to the Atlantic world. The Irish supranational imagined the triumph of a distinctive Irish identity and freedom from British rule through radical egalitarianism and violent, international rebellion, while the Scottish supranational represented Scots dialect and culture as connected to stories of Scottish resistance to British imperial power and, at the same time, the spread of Smithian economic theory. Authors from both sides debated the terms by which a peaceful accommodation could be found between nationalisms and emergent forces that threatened national autonomy. Supranations thus engages important problems in postcolonial theory, British literary history, and transatlantic Romanticism.