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PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY AND THE VISUAL APPEARANCE OF AN IRISH NATIONALIST DISCOURSE 1840–1870

NATION, NATIONALITY, AND NATIONALISM, as Benedict Anderson proposes, “have all proved difficult to define let alone analyse” (12). However, while identifying the difficulty in qualifying what national identity is, his proposal suggests that it is “an imagined political identity” in which “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their community” (14). This formulation had a major impact on subsequent critical studies of nationalism and its formation. This text is also significant because it clearly identifies the way in which the growth of national identity was dependent on the mass distribution of information, made possible during the industrial revolution and the early Victorian period. The new industrial bourgeoisie, Anderson explains, came “to visualise in a general way the existence of thousands and thousands like themselves through print-language.” As a result, “in world-historical terms bourgeoisies were the first classes to achieve solidarities on an essentially imagined basis” (74). This revelation has led critical studies on the emergence of Irish nationalism during the early nineteenth century to consider how dependent it was on mass-produced and distributed information. David Lloyd concludes, “nationalism is inconceivable except as a product of modernity” (1) while Joep Leerssen’s study on the emergence of a popular conception of the past constructed in various literary forms explains how it was “unlike its eighteenth century precursor, patriotism” because nationalism “relie[d] crucially on an awareness that Ireland is distinct and distinctive, culturally individuated and discrete” (4). The role literary representations played in the construction of an Irish identity during this formative period has received much critical attention. A number of texts, such as Leerssen, explain how this emergent nationalist discourse (in common with discourses in Britain and across much of Europe) was primarily designed to construct an exclusive/inclusive perception of nation. However, because Ireland was colonized by Britain during this formative moment the history of such discourses is slightly more complicated than other parts of Europe as discourses of power, more commonly associated with Victorian colonial and imperialist culture, are also present. Edward Said explains how imperialized nations during this period