Type: Article
Nic Eoin, Máirín. ‘Secrets and Disguises? Caitlín Ní Uallacháin and other female personages in eighteenth-century Irish political poetry’, Eighteenth-century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr, Vol. 11 (1996), pp 7-45.
This article discusses the use of vernacular names as the female personification of land and sovereignty in eighteenth-century Irish political poetry. The article provides an explanation of the literary and political significance of names such as Caitlín Ní Uallacháin, Síle Ní Ghadhra, Móirín Ní Chuilleanáin /Luineacháin / Ghiobarláin, and Gráinne Mhaol Ní Mháille. Nic Eoin discusses the importance of each of these female figures within the context of eighteenth-century aisling poetry and Irish Jacobite songs. In using vernacular names, eighteenth-century poets were above all reclaiming the emotive force of the female sovereignty figure which had been denigrated in seventeenth-century political poetry being less a metaphorical representation of Ireland, and more a metonym for the oppressed Catholic population.