“Rebellion in the Celestial Empire”: Sino-Irish Sympathy in Sydney Owenson's Florence Macarthy

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the relationship between China and Ireland in Sydney Owenson's Florence Macarthy (1818). It focuses on the interaction between China and Ireland within the wider context of Enlightenment formations of sympathy, suggesting that Owenson's depiction of China is closely linked to the aesthetic of sensibility and its implied model of an emergent cosmopolitanism based on cross-cultural identification. In doing so, it positions the novel within a body of writing about China and Ireland that includes John Wilson Croker's An Intercepted Letter from J– T–, Esq. (1804), exposing a number of shared concerns with Croker and revealing how depictions of China operated as a central component in the articulation and formation of British identity in the Romantic period, problematizing and rearticulating established models of international cultural assimilation.

Notes

1. For a discussion of The Missionary and Orientalism see Lennon (143–55) and Wright (“Introduction”).

2. See Chang for a fuller discussion of the role of vision in British representations of China in the nineteenth century.