Dr Clíona Ó Gallchoir (UCC), ‘"Harry Ormond, of no town": The local, the transnational and the imperial in Maria Edgeworth’s Ireland'.

In Ormond (1817), the eponymous hero’s journey from placeless orphan to ‘estated gentleman’ involves experiences that combine local attachment, transnational influences and, ultimately, an imperial inheritance. The novel’s deft weaving of these contexts in the form of a Bildungsroman reflects Maria Edgeworth’s recurring preoccupation with the interplay of the local and the global as powerful drivers of change in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Ireland. This paper will locate its reading of the novel within the context of Edgeworth’s work more broadly, as well as considering its place within critical debates on the imperial and colonial dimensions of the novel in this period.

Clíona Ó Gallchoir is a lecturer in the School of English and Digital Humanities at University College Cork. Her critical introduction to Maria Edgeworth was published in 2021 by Edward Everett Root as part of the new Key Irish Women Writers series. Other recent publications include an article on Edgeworth and Robinson Crusoe in European Romantic Review (2020), and essays in The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights, 1716-2016 (Liverpool University Press, 2021) and in Irish Literature in Transition, 1700-1780 (CUP, 2020). She is the author of Maria Edgeworth: Women, Enlightenment and Nation (UCD Press, 2005), and the co-editor, with Heather Ingman, of A History of Modern Irish Women’s Writing (CUP, 2018).

This event will be held both in person in the Irish Studies Seminar Room and online via MS Teams. 

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