Ireland as Colonial Arcadia: river-nymphs and ecocriticism
Résumé
Arcadia is traditionally a literary décor, an idealized but essentially flat landscape for poetic projections and contrasts. Its literary essence is contrary to the territorial and representational appropriation of the colonial project, which aims to bring the desired colony under the control of administrators, precisely mapped and measured. The administrative impulse of colonialism is thus at first sight at odds with what Patricia Coughlan has identified as a strong idealizing tendency in English writing on Ireland in the 17th century, which in many cases takes on an Arcadian colouring. Recent criticism has drawn attention to the convergence of colonial and ecocritical perspectives in Spenser and Shakespeare, amongst others. In this paper, I would like to examine some of the tensions inherent in representations of what I call the ‘Colonial Arcadia’, in a corpus of New English writers’, and especially Edmund Spenser’s, representations of Irish rivers and river-nymphs. Drawing on Thomas Herron’s notion of the ‘plantation aesthetic’ and Richard McCabe’s ‘poetics of difference’, the paper will historicize certain ecocritical concepts in relation to intertexts and contexts, literary modes and Irish history in colonial representations of Irish rivers.