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Article: Another tale to tell: postcolonial theory and the case of 'Castle Rackrent.'
- Article from:
- Criticism
- Article date:
- June 22, 1994
- Author:
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Published in the year of the Act of Union, which ended Ireland's nominal independence from England by dissolving the Irish Parliament, Castle Rackrent (1800) has been read mainly as a regional tale, a novel of place. Said to inaugurate the Anglo-Irish novelistic tradition, it is likewise understood to be a comic work, an exemplar of the ironic mode in which Maria Edgeworth's narrator, Thady Quirk, is rather less knowing than he realizes about the full implications of the tale he tells. But it is also, in Suvendrini Perera's words, "the first significant English novel to speak in the voice of the colonized,"(1) and the conjunction among these classificatory ...