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Bog Men: Celtic Landscapes in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Satire

Kavanagh, Declan (2019) Bog Men: Celtic Landscapes in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Satire. In: Barr, R. A. and Brady, S. and McGaughey, J., eds. Ireland and Masculinities in History: Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 67-88. ISBN 978-3-030-02637-0. E-ISBN 978-3-030-02638-7. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:58316)

The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided. (Contact us about this Publication)
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https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-03...

Abstract

This chapter analyses representations of Celtic landscapes by English satirists in the 1760s. Whereas late eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish writers treated the bog as signifying not only colonial oppression, but also an opportunity for agricultural and political improvement, English metropolitan authors at mid-century represented Britain’s Celtic fringes as intractable, primitive, and unprofitable. In sustained attacks on the nationality and politics of writers such as Tobias Smollett and Arthur Murphy, John Wilkes and Charles Churchill in The North Briton deployed images of barrenness, sexual rapacity, queerness and emasculation to reconfigure England’s political relations with Ireland and Scotland. By conflating Irish and Scottish men with the anomalous site of the wasteland, this essay shows how the rhetoric of the bog delegitimised Celtic participation in English political and colonial discourses.

Item Type: Book section
Uncontrolled keywords: Satire, masculinities, literature, Enlightenment, Celtic, Ireland, Scotland
Subjects: D History General and Old World
D History General and Old World > DA Great Britain
P Language and Literature
P Language and Literature > PE English philology and language
P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Arts and Humanities > School of English
Depositing User: Declan Kavanagh
Date Deposited: 01 Nov 2016 18:44 UTC
Last Modified: 29 Sep 2021 15:28 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/58316 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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