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, violence, and distress to be discovered at the long-desired home. In other works, as discussed in the final section of this chapter, the characters’ experiences abroad, although often presented as digressions from a more central concern with Ireland, are positively construed as the key to the restoration of rights at home and the construction of new national identities in the wake of the 1798 Rebellion and the Anglo-Irish Union. These figures strikingly evidence a decided interest in ‘home’ settings in Romantic-era Irish gothic literary production
national identity, Anderson contended that it is mobility – of people and print – rather than geographical rootedness that produces the cultural and linguistic ‘hybridity’ from which emerge ‘[n]ationalism's purities’. 141 The modern nation-state's foundation in hybridity allows for diasporic nationalism or, in Anderson's words, ‘long-distance nationalism’, by which exiled or migrant communities might feel a part of a ‘home’ country at a distance. At the same time, it recognises the manner in which, as Nancy Vogeley observes, the developing print trade encouraged an
liberty and vigour’. 55 They also signalled their intentions ‘to explore the mythology of English national identity’, as Scott would later do in his revision of his novels’ ‘Gothic ancestry’. 56 Reeve's ‘picture of Gothic times and manners’ refers to the understanding of the Gothic past as a foreign and bizarre epoch temporally and ideologically removed from modern-day England ( Old English baron , p. 2). Although specifically recalling the second edition of Otranto with her subtitle, ‘a gothic story’, Reeve tones down the supernatural excess of Walpole's tale in
The wild Irish girl and The absentee , see, for instance, Julia Anne Miller, ‘Acts of union: family violence and national courtship in Maria Edgeworth's The absentee and Sydney Owenson's The wild Irish gir l’, in Kathryn Kirkpatrick (ed.), Border crossings: Irish women writers and national identities (Tuscaloosa, AL and London: The University of Alabama Press, 2000), pp. 13–37; Morin, Charles Robert Maturin , pp. 9–10, 46–7, 65–8; and Morin, ‘ “Gothic” and “national