The Politics of the Presidency

This chapter assesses the political role of the President of Ireland, exploring the tension between the authority implied by direct election and the limited powers explicitly granted to the President in the constitution. It outlines the changing role of the President since the creation of the office in 1938, drawing attention in particular to the manner in which incumbents have pushed out the perceived boundaries of the office since 1990. It begins by looking at the manner in which the President is elected and the institutional architecture within which the office is embedded. It continues by exploring the formal constitutional and legal provisions that define the President’s role, evaluating the historical legacy that shaped the office in its early years. The chapter concludes by assessing the manner in which the office has been transformed, most notably by the three most recent presidents (Mary Robinson, Mary McAleese, and Michael D Higgins).

The Power of Gossip from Mary Robinson’s Tabitha Bramble to Lyrical Tales

This essay focuses on the often overlooked, if not derided, comic tales of Mary Robinson, arguing their centrality to the poetic and political project of Lyrical Tales (1800). It does so in two ways: first, by repositioning Robinson’s use of the pseudonym Tabitha Bramble, not as an off-key performance of Tobias Smollett’s original character, but as an empowered voice authoring her own tale, and, second, by correcting the commonplace critical assumption that the revised poems in Lyrical Tales remain Tabitha Bramble poems. Attending to Robinson’s careful revision process enlarges a critical understanding of Robinson’s relationship to female voice, from her reimagined Tabitha Bramble in newspaper verse to her reclamation of gossip in Lyrical Tales.

Lyric Population and the Prospects of Police

This chapter offers a new reading of vagrancy in early Romantic poetry. By reading the poetry of Mary Robinson against the backdrop of police reform and vagrancy law at the end of the eighteenth century, it proposes a turn away from lyric or legal subjectivity in order to see other crucial poetic valences of what can be termed “Romantic vagrancy.” Robinson not only pushes one to reconsider a literary-historical narrative that has long been dominated by William Wordsworth, but also offers an engagement with vagrancy that theorizes law and lyric as intersecting precisely where legal persons and lyric subjects disappear. Tracing how Robinson's collection brings rural English poverty into the same frame as global war, the scandal of destitute Asian sailors stranded in London by the East India Company, the Sierra Leone colonization project, and the role of police reformers in reshaping dockside labor in London, the chapter argues that poetic vagrancy allows one to understand its most iconic recurring image — the dispossession of the rural English poor — as an optic for invoking vast scales and distant populations. Vagrancy's relation to police, especially as a mode of governmentality that spanned scales from local to global, is in fact crucial to its poetic redeployment.

Feminism and the Position of Women

Feminism in its modern meanings attests to a movement for change in the social, economic and legal position of women. In the Romantic period, no such movement existed. There were, however, individual women whose voices, separately and together, suggest the existence of a commonality of feeling around the intellectual advancement of the female sex. This article examines writing by women on female education and sexual and social reform, focussing on the work of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Mary Robinson, and Mary Lamb. It connects political writing and educational treatises to the novels and essays written by these women and it reflects on the shared concerns from which modern feminism emerged.

Women’s Fiction

This essay gives an overview of women’s fiction published between the late 18th and early 19th century, focusing on their interest in sensibility, education, and marriage. Women’s novels during this period were very much influenced by the literary genre called the novel of sensibility, which celebrates emotional concepts such as sentiment, delicacy, and sensibility. In promoting education for women, many female novelists not only vindicated women’s capacity to reason, but also recommended moral feeling for others. Although Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, and Susan Ferrier believed that women should embrace reason, they knew that domestic affections were necessary. Affectionate ties or compassion are key to understanding the novels of Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson. Possessing neither was detrimental to the happiness of heroines of this period, and this is typically observed in Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791) – pursuing one’s desire without restraint would lead to self-destruction. Jane Austen and Mary Shelley were writing their novels when the radical movement connected to Mary Wollstonecraft’s assertion about the need for women’s education had subsided: excessive indulgence of emotions and sexual appetite were cautioned against in their novels. Although in the early 19th-century sexual transgressions were condemned, some novelists such as Charlotte Dacre explored the theme of women’s sexual freedom.

Woman and Brute in Feminism

This chapter treats 1790s feminist writing by Mary Wollstonecraft, Catharine Macaulay, Mary Hays, and Mary Robinson, tracing conflicts in their thought created by the question of the animal. Faced by the animalization of women based on their identification with the sexual and reproductive body, feminists appealed to a disembodied reason to argue for their equality with men; but their sympathy with nonhuman animals as sharing in their victimization by men encouraged some revaluation of animality. Wollstonecraft’s foundational work on the rights of woman makes an anthropocentric commitment to unique human rationality, and reveals anxieties attributable to her reading of natural history discourses that naturalized the subordination of women. Robinson shows greater confidence in disembodied reason as guarantor of gender equality. The chapter traces the development of sympathetic responses both to human animality and nonhuman animals in Macaulay, Hays, and in Wollstonecraft’s own later work.

Writing About Animals in the Age of Revolution

This book argues that shifting attitudes to nonhuman animals in eighteenth-century Britain affected the emergence of radical political claims based on the concept of universal human rights. It examines a tension in 1790s radicalism between the anthropocentrism of the concept of the ‘rights of man’, and the challenge to human exceptionalism entailed by attempts to extend benevolent consideration to nonhuman animals. The development of a naturalistic and sympathetic literature of animal subjectivity is traced with particular attention to the innovatory representation of nonhuman animal perspectives within children’s literature. The study explores the complex relationship between animal representation and claims for human rights through an investigation of writing by and about four overlapping human groups—children, women, slaves, and the lower classes—whose social subordination was grounded in their cultural construction as less than fully human. Emancipatory movements of political reform, abolition, and feminism, and the animal representations produced within those movements, were affected by the varying forms of animalization applied to each oppressed group. A final chapter considers the legacy of 1790s animal rights discourses in the early-nineteenth-century campaign for anti-cruelty legislation. The book’s many literary animals include the ass, ambiguous emblem of sympathetic animal writing; the great ape or ‘orang-outang’, central to racist discourse; and the pig, adopted by 1790s radicals to signify their rebellion. Writers considered include Sterne, Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Clare, Wollstonecraft, Barbauld, Hays, Mary Robinson, Equiano, Sancho, Cugoano, Clarkson, Thomas Spence, Daniel Isaac Eaton, John Oswald, Joseph Ritson, Thomas Erskine, and John Lawrence.

Introspecting Gender Concerns in National Action Plan for Climate Change of India

The climate sceptics faltered at COP21 Paris summit after climate change was accepted as a real threat. An agreement across tables on historical ‘polluters pay’ principle shifted the burden of curbing the emissions on developed economies. However, gender concerns were conspicuous by their absence in all agreements. Mary Robinson, a UN envoy at the summit precisely pointed out that Paris climate summit’s gender imbalance with substantial male domination is inimical to taking appropriate action to save people from climate change risks. The research shows a poor track record with minimum or no presence of women representatives in any breakthrough deal and discussion. There is a tendency to avert their voices and concerns in any stamped deals done by governments and organisations at international, national, sub-national levels. Despite such gender omission, the policy discourse carries an inherent assumption of gender neutrality while designing adaptation and mitigation efforts in averting climate-related stress. This paper is an attempt to unravel such ungendered tendency, by a critical examination of the National Action Plan for Climate Change in India to bring out an apparent masculinisation of the policy discourse.