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Maria Edgeworth’s Poetics of Rent

This article argues that Maria Edgeworth’s first three Irish Tales Castle Rackrent (1800), Ennui (1809), and The Absentee (1812) respond to Adam Smith’s writings on economic rent by constructing a new poetics premised on the unequal conditions of colonial ownership. This poetics presents literary representation not asanindividual act of “making,” but rather through transactions of “rendering” between differently enfranchised makers and owners. After demonstrating the importance of Smith’s concept of rent to his theories of free trade and national development, I show how Edgeworth’s poetics of rent adopts the language of laissez-faireeconomics in order to re-sentimentalize damaged relations between Anglo-Irish landlords and their tenants. By following Smith in grounding national development in the economics of agricultural rent, the Irish Tales propose an alternative to the more familiar frameworks of liberal development put forward in the nineteenth century.