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Literary Minstrelsy, 1770–1830The Minstrel in the World: Sydney Owenson and Irish Internationalism

Literary Minstrelsy, 1770–1830: The Minstrel in the World: Sydney Owenson and Irish Internationalism [The conscious, consistent foundation of minstrel writing is the deployment of personae that are crucially autobiographical, in ways that encourage fantasies of transparent identifications of author and character, and just as importantly not autobiographical, in ways that emphasize breaks between authors and their historical environments. Such breaks constitute the explicit rationale for creating minstrel writing: authors take up the subject of minstrelsy in writing precisely because minstrelsy has disappeared or is disappearing. By creating a model of the collector-author who speaks of a chronological environment other than his or her own, this trope of the disappearing minstrel justifies imaginative travel to geographical settings other than the author’s. In Sydney Owenson’s 1805 novel The Novice of Saint Dominick — whose working title was The Minstrel — the narrator remarks that ‘a minstrel’s garb is a passport every where’ (I.275). Owenson was in her mid-twenties when The Novice was published; this chapter will use the early part of her career as its central example to study how Owenson exploits minstrel writing’s capacity to act as a passport to places, times, and public participation that the author, in propria persona, could not attain. The minstrel’s garb enabled authors to explore literary worlds that break ties to a local context — the ties underlying both Wordsworthian localism and what Katie Trumpener describes as bardic nationalism.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Literary Minstrelsy, 1770–1830The Minstrel in the World: Sydney Owenson and Irish Internationalism

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Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan UK
Copyright
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2008
ISBN
978-1-349-29923-2
Pages
27 –50
DOI
10.1057/9780230593985_2
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[The conscious, consistent foundation of minstrel writing is the deployment of personae that are crucially autobiographical, in ways that encourage fantasies of transparent identifications of author and character, and just as importantly not autobiographical, in ways that emphasize breaks between authors and their historical environments. Such breaks constitute the explicit rationale for creating minstrel writing: authors take up the subject of minstrelsy in writing precisely because minstrelsy has disappeared or is disappearing. By creating a model of the collector-author who speaks of a chronological environment other than his or her own, this trope of the disappearing minstrel justifies imaginative travel to geographical settings other than the author’s. In Sydney Owenson’s 1805 novel The Novice of Saint Dominick — whose working title was The Minstrel — the narrator remarks that ‘a minstrel’s garb is a passport every where’ (I.275). Owenson was in her mid-twenties when The Novice was published; this chapter will use the early part of her career as its central example to study how Owenson exploits minstrel writing’s capacity to act as a passport to places, times, and public participation that the author, in propria persona, could not attain. The minstrel’s garb enabled authors to explore literary worlds that break ties to a local context — the ties underlying both Wordsworthian localism and what Katie Trumpener describes as bardic nationalism.]

Published: Oct 21, 2015

Keywords: Henry VIII; English Poet; Irish History; Irish Speaker; Irish Situation

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