... discursive formation I examine take cross-cultural contact, implicitly but not exclusively figured in the trope of union, as fundamental not only to reforming the Irish, but to trans- forming the ... ‘‘English,’’ for example, has enforced the sense that Irish writing is itself somehow marginal to English writing in this period, reinscribing the political inequality that the Act of Union institutionalized ... figured as the prime agent for establishing Introduction English colonial hegemony in Ireland, I argue for the centrality of gender to any study of English or Irish nation-formation. Indeed, this...