"Can Fancy Add One Horror More?" Radical Sympathy in Hugh Mulligan's Eclogues against the Empire

The article explores the ways in which the Irish poet Hugh Mulligan addresses the question of sympathetic imagination in his anti-imperialist eclogues. As a working-class artist coming from an internal colony, Mulligan rejects the paternalistic tone of high-brow abolitionism as well as the sensationalism of much anti-slavery rhetoric, and embraces sympathy as a middle ground between realism and affect. His eclogues are structured upon a mode of dramatized sympathy whereby the terms of the 18th century humanitarian discourse are radically contested through a proto-environmental ethos of cultural specificity that locates the question of slavery within the larger frame of the history and physiology of the British empire.