Acts of Union: Representing nation-states and national identities in Victorian British and Irish writing (Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold)

In 1800, the Act of Union incorporated Ireland into the United Kingdom, legislatively harnessing a colony to imperial Britain. Incorporation as a mode of colonial domination inaugurated a series of crises in Great Britain and Ireland concerning ideas of national belonging, racial integrity, the state, and citizenship. This dissertation investigates how Victorian writers on both sides of the Irish Sea grappled with these problems of the 'national.' "Acts of Union: Representing Nation-States and National Identities in Victorian British and Irish Writing" explores how Victorian ideas of British national identity and nationalism are inextricable from discourses concerning Irish identity and anti-colonial nationalism. By reading prose and popular culture, I examine the ways in which ideologies foundational to nineteenth-century British nationalism---the 'condition of England' question, Victorian Unionism, the emergence of the modern state, and the expanding definition of British citizenship---are constructed in relation to representations of and debates about the place of Ireland in the United Kingdom. When examining these discourses on 'Irishness' and 'Britishness,' I pay particular attention to ideas of racial difference, the gendering of national identity, and essentialist understandings of Irish nationalism.; In order to suggest the articulation of British and Irish nationalisms in the period, my project has a contrapuntal structure. Chapters on British writers such as Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and Matthew Arnold are coupled with readings of Irish nationalist writing in the period, in particular the genre of Fenian recollections that appeared in the late 19th century. This structure allows me to examine how Irish nationalist writers represent national identity and national history in response to British discourses on Irishness, challenging, reappropriating, and often absorbing them. "Acts of Union" asks how this extraordinarily sophisticated relationship between imperialist and anti-colonial nationalisms both demands a rethinking of the assumed geographical boundaries of Victorian studies and constitutes a significant intervention into theoretical work on the relation between colony and imperial center in postcolonial studies.