Performing Irishness: Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, And the "Doubt of Identity"/Irlandaliligi Sunmak: Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, Ve "Kimlik Suphesi‪.‬

Abstract: Sydney Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale (1806) reflects a preoccupation with issues of identity and performativity that dominated her literary and political agendas. Famously adopting the public persona of her eponymous heroine, Owenson initiated the genre of the Irish national tale for her Anglo-Irish readers. Her best-known novel consequently interrogates the problem of cultural hybridity in post-Union Ireland. The Wild Irish Girl suggests that Irishness must be actively claimed or performed to keep it alive in the wake of a Union that threatens its very existence. Linking the "marriage" of England and Ireland to the death of Irish culture, Owenson's novel suggests that the performance of Irish rituals--especially funerary rites--makes it possible to resist death by marriage. Keywords: Sydney Owenson, The Wild Irish Girl, identity and performativity, Irish national tale, cultural hybridity, post-Union Ireland