From Gaeltacht to Grub Street: The Eighteenth-Century Public Sphere in a Four-Nations Context

My dissertation examines how the different languages and literatures of eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland play important roles in the development of a multilingual British public sphere. While eighteenth-century print culture is dominated by English, and by London in particular, I find that writers from across the three kingdoms use manuscript in conjunction with print, or a strategic bilingualism, in order to address particular national or linguistic 'publics.' I argue that the formation of this multilingual public sphere, like the formation of the British empire, cuts across linguistic and geographical boundaries, leading to a productive cross-pollination between writing in English, Irish, Scots Gaelic and vernacular Scots. Focusing on bilingualism, translation and print culture, my project broadens the scope of recent 'four-nations' approaches and provides a comparative model for understanding important developments in eighteenth-century British literature.