... means as monotonously monolithic and insensitive to historical change as Eagleton’s work in particular may make it seem. Bypaying close attention to rhetorical matters, and especially to the con-crete ... the modernizing imperial familyof man. I attend to narrative structure, and to the kind of stories that gettold and retold about the Irish, so as to reveal both the regularity ofEnglish colonial ... the writing of both history and literary history, constituting the study of the literaryand historical past as contested terrain in the present will, I hope, lead us to be more attuned to the...