We will make the happy tremble’
Triumphal victimhood in Charles Robert Maturin's The Milesian Chief
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12303232 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ian Dennis (0000-0002-5296-6814, University of Ottawa, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2012 |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 47-64 |
| Publication date | 2012-02-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Irish Studies Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0967-0882 • E-ISSN: 1469-9303 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/09670882.2012.655928 |
| OpenAlex | W1974242865 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 13 |
Charles Robert Maturin’s The Milesian Chief (1812), long neglected, may now be ripe for closer attention, particularly for its evocation of the imagined power of suffering over audiences. Deploying a structure supplied by Sidney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl and Madame De Staël’s Corinne, the novel dramatizes the arrival of a cosmopolitan heroine in Ireland, her tortured romance with an Irish nobleman, and their ultimate destruction in a rebellion vaguely reminiscent of those of 1798 and 1803. Less useful for its insight into national history than for its almost anthropological grasp of deeply changing patterns of desire, the novel dramatises a struggle that ends in a striking triumphalism little noted by previous critics. The concepts of René Girard and Eric Gans are used to assess the work’s rhetoric of victimhood and its insistent emphasis on the effect of renunciations of desire on adversaries individual and collective
Art · Art history · Evocation · Irish · Literature · Power (physics · Rage (emotion · Rhetoric · Romance · Theology · History · Irish and British Studies · Joseph Conrad and Literature · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Philosophy · Psychology
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |