I.C. Ross’s scientific contributions

Mapping Vertue Rewarded (1693) and Sarah Butler's Irish Tales (1716) reveals significant cartographical and narrative distinctions between these and two near-contemporary English fictions, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719). While the latter show the contemporary colonizing movement outwards from England, Vertue Rewarded and Irish Tales reveal trajectories of invasion and incursion, characteristic of historiographical accounts of Ireland, from the eleventh-century Lebor Gabála Érenn onwards. A broader engagement with pre-Romantic Irish literature, it is argued, may help to address contemporary anxieties about the study of national literature(s), along lines suggested by the current comparatist objectives of the literary cartographer and theorist, Franco Moretti.