Official URL: https://www.efacis.eu/content/irish-studies-europe...

In this chapter, I cast the Stage Irish tradition in a new light by demonstrating its interdependence with the history of the Irish literary hoax. At first blush, these representational discourses appear to be united through a certain rhetoric of the false or the fake: the hoax is a willed self-misrepresentation, while the stock figure of the Stage Irishman is, perhaps, an imposed and othering misrepresentation. However, my argument is that the connection between these literary traditions and their histories runs deeper and is more complex than such a characterisation allows. Indeed, I suggest that closer analysis of the Irish literary hoaxer and the Stage Irishman renders such clear-cut distinctions between agency and imposition untenable. These figures are, in important ways, co-emergent and track each other’s developments closely. The Irish literary hoax interfaces with, and functions at times as a counter-discursive foil to, the dominant Stage Irish hetero-stereotype – particularly in instances in which Irish authors will fully assume the stereotypes of Paddywhackery to deceive certain audiences and to deconstruct or ridicule certain discourses about national identity.