This book is a genealogy of reconciliation in modern Ireland. As Seamus Deane has written, reconciliation stands at a nexus between politics and aesthetics in Irish writing, and has therefore often been a vehicle of colonial ideology. This book shows that the term often fits into a pattern that the author calls the -iconography of reconciliation-.



This iconography began in the 1810s when Samuel Taylor Coleridge synthesized Edmund Burke's thoughts about Ciceronian conciliatio and Aristotelian ethos with Schlegelian literary organicism. That is, Coleridge identified what...