... suspicious – not of the fact of conquest the poemdescribes, but of the sexualized and gendered binary it superimposes onthe colonial relation, and of its attendant use of rape as a metaphor of imperial ... negotiation of colonialpolitics. Examining English fictions about Ireland shows us that novelis-tic plots – narratives of courtship and marriage, of individual develop-ment as well as of family ... especially through the making of anational(ist) canon, but through the radical rethinking of ‘‘nation,’’ of ‘‘nationalism,’’ of ‘‘literature’’ itself. In some of its de-anglicizing incar-nations,...