of National Identity
Recent years have witnessed a great deal of attention to the emergence of nationalism in late eighteenth century Europe, and critics such as Seamus Deane have drawn particular attention to the way in which the new nationalist narratives tended to displace the older cosmopolitan narrative of universal subjects and universal reason. As Deane points out, Enlightenment forms of narrative (like the philosophical tale) were threatened by a "newly assertive nationalism, predicated on notions of national character."'1 The kind of national thinking and narrative that he has in mind is represented by a figure like Edmund Burke and his well known argument anchoring national identity in attachment to one's "little platoon."2 But the same Anglo Irish milieu that produced Burke also produced Maria Edgeworth, who offered a rather different reading of national identity in the same period. Her writing on Ireland, especially her early Irish tales, offers an important rearticulation of Burkean local attachment and philosophical cosmopolitanism to produce an understanding of the nation as neither tightly bordered (like nations based on historical premises such as blood or inheritance) nor borderless (like those based on rational notions of universal inclusion) This effort to rethink nationness makes Edgeworth more than the colonial writer who figures in current criticism.3 Having herself been both immersed in Continental Enlightenment thought and personally affected by the nationalist upsurge of the 1798 Rebellion, she used herwriting to reconsider the meaning of the denomination "AngloIrish."4 And through her interrogation she reinterpreted both cosmopolitan and national definitions of belonging so as to reconstitute "Anglo Irish" less as a category than as an ongoing mediation between borders.