This thesis examines the representation of Ireland in images and texts
produced in Britain and France between 1839 and 1855. I argue that in this period,
Ireland functioned as a crucial site for the negotiation and transformation of the
relationship between the two nations. Chapter One examines a popular middle-class
British publication of 1845, Maxwell's History of the Irish Rebellion of 1798.. .and
Emmett's Insurrection. Through an analysis of George Cruikshank's illustrations to
this work, I explore the ways that a predominant image of the Irish was linked to
British anxieties concerning a potential political alliance between the French and the
Irish based on what was represented as a "natural" religio-racial connection between
the two nations. Developing this transnational focus, I argue that French concern with
Ireland exacerbated such constructions. Chapter Two examines liberal and leftleaning
French publications that took up representations of the Irish between 1839 to
1846 in order to critique Britain's role as a modern industrial nation. In Chapter
Three I analyze how "Irishness" in the French press between 1845 and 1847, and in
satires by artists like Cham and Paul Gavarni, served both as a warning against
French adoption of the English economic model of laissez-faire capitalism, and as a
commentary on domestic working class poverty. Chapter Four explores how the Irish
were taken up both visually and textually in the French press to be momentarily
transformed into active agents of radical change in the year of France's revolution of
1848. My final chapter concludes with an analysis of French artist Gustave Courbet's
figure of an Irishwoman as a complex marker of both pauperism and potential
revolution in a contentious painting displayed strategically outside Paris' 1855
Exposition universelle. In the course of this analysis "Ireland" is shown to raise a
range of issues concerning relations between France and Britain. While images of
Irishness evoked the mobility and exchange that characterized an early moment of
free trade, those same images could simultaneously arouse anxieties in both Britain
and France around industrialization, the "advancement" of civil liberties, the growing
pauperization of populations, and the threat to both nations of calls for republican
reform. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/17009 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Mewburn, Charity |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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