ABSTRACT
Scenic tourism in Ireland did not begin until the later eighteenth century, long after the country's invasion and subjugation by Anglo-Norman and English arms. In the writing which had accompanied and rationalised sixteenth and seventeenth-century conquest and plantation, there had been an evident relation between the forcible seizure of the land and its representation as a space to be possessed. Harrington, in The English Traveller in Ireland, Hadfield and McVeagh in Strangers to that Land, and Bradshaw, Hadfield, and Maley in Representing Ireland: Literature and the origins of conflict reprint extracts from this genre and offer commentary on them. The rendering of the land as available for conquest and use might involve its feminisation as the object of the conqueror's manly powers, as in Luke Gernon's early seventeenth-century A Discourse of Ireland, with its depiction of the country as a 'Nymph' who 'wants a husband' because she is 'not embraced, ... not [yet] hedged and diched' (quoted in Hadfield and McVeagh, 1994, 66). This trope, which combines a pleasurable gaze with a masterful intent, has later parallels in the language of North American settler colonialism (Kolodny, 1975), and some analogous way of seeing perhaps informs most representations of landscapes as the object of pleasure. Is all gazing, all enjoyment of prospects and panoramas, a metaphorical or imaginary possession of what is beheld?I Scenic tourists who write about Irish landscapes and about the condition of Ireland in the early decades of the nineteenth century do not see the land with a consciously appropriative or proprietorial vision; but they reveal - in the confident gaze which they bestow, in the manner of their judgements -. their assumption that the English visitor was in a position to command a view of Ireland in all its aspects.
