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A 2024 CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLEnovels by Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and Sylvia Townsend Warner as political theology – works that imagine a resistance to the fusion of Christianity and patriotism which fuelled and supported the First World War – this book shows how we can gain valuable insights from their works for anti-militarist, anti-statist, and anti-nationalist efforts today. While none of the four novelists in this study were committed Christians during the 1920s, Andrews explores how their fiction written in the wake of the First World War operates theologically when it challenges English civil religion – the rituals of the nation that elevate the state to a form of divinity. Bringing these novels into a dialogue with recent political theologies by theorists and theologians including Giorgio Agamben, William Cavanaugh, Simon Critchley, Michel Foucault, Stanley Hauerwas and Jürgen Moltmann, this book shows the myriad ways that we can learn from the authors'theopolitical imaginations.Andrews demonstrates the many ways that these novelists issue a challenge to the problems with civil religion and the sacralized nation state and, in so doing, offer alternative visions to coordinate our inner lives with our public and collective actions.

El presente estudio es un intento por determinar el valor histórico de Adán Buenosayres (1948) de Leopoldo Marechal, una de las novelas más paradigmáticas de la literatura argentina del siglo XX. La obra es un ejemplo de cómo la vanguardia persiste en el género narrativo tras su primera eclosión y, a su vez, cómo se concilia con el nacionalismo hispano-católico que se configura durante los años treinta en el país. Adán Buenosayres es un punto de inflexión porque constituye una novela vanguardista refundacional de la patria; es por ello que esta investigación replantea las relaciones teóricas entre nacionalismo y vanguardia, así como propone una nueva perspectiva del valor histórico de esta obra en la literatura argentina y en su canonización nacional.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Irish writers played a key role in transatlantic cultural conversations – among Canada, Britain, France, America, and Indigenous nations – that shaped Canadian nationalism. Nationalism in Ireland was likewise influenced by the literary works of Irish migrants and visitors to Canada.Canada to Ireland explores the poetry and prose of twelve Irish writers and nationalists in Canada between 1788 and 1900, including Thomas Moore, Adam Kidd, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Thomas D'Arcy McGee, James McCarroll, Nicholas Flood Davin, and Isabella Valancy Crawford. Many of these writers were involved in Irish political causes, including those of the Patriots, the United Irish, Emancipation, Repeal, and Young Ireland, and their work explores the similar ways in which nationalists in Ireland and Indigenous and settler communities in Canada retained their cultural identities and sought autonomy from Britain. Initially writing for an audience in Ireland, they highlighted features of the landscape and culture that they regarded as distinctively Canadian and that were later invoked as powerful unifying symbols by Canadian nationalists. Michele Holmgren shows how these Irish writers and movements are essential to understanding the tenor of early Canadian literary nationalism and political debates concerning Confederation, imperial unity, and western expansion.Canada to Ireland convincingly demonstrates that Canadian cultural nationalism left its mark on both countries. Contemporary decolonization movements in Canada and current cultural exchanges between Ireland and Indigenous peoples make this a timely and relevant study.

Scotland, Britain, Empire takes on a cliché that permeates writing from and about the literature of the Scottish Highlands. Popular and influential in its time, this literature fell into disrepute for circulating a distorted and deforming myth that aided in Scotland's marginalization by consigning Scottish culture into the past while drawing a mist over harsher realities. Kenneth McNeil invokes recent work in postcolonial studies to show how British writers of the Romantic period were actually shaping a more complex national and imperial consciousness. He discusses canonical works—the works of James Macpherson and Sir Walter Scott—and noncanonical and nonliterary works—particularly in the fields of historiography, anthropology, and sociology. This book calls for a rethinking of the “romanticization” of the Highlands and shows that Scottish writing on the Highlands reflects the unique circumstances of a culture simultaneously feeling the weight of imperial “anglobalization” while playing a vital role in its inception. While writers from both sides of the Highland line looked to the traditions, language, and landscape of the Highlands to define their national character, the Highlands were deemed the space of the primitive—like other spaces around the globe brought under imperial sway. But this concern with the value and fate of indigenousness was in fact a turn to the modern.

Often thought of as a thing of the past, nationalism remains surprisingly resilient in the postcolonial era, especially since the concepts of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism have lost authority in recent years. The contributions assembled in Nationalism and the Postcolonial examine various forms, representations, and consequences of past and present nationalisms in languages, popular culture, and literature in or associated with Australia, Canada, England, India, Jamaica, Kenya, Nigeria, Saint Lucia, and Trinidad and Tobago Bringing together perspectives from linguistics, political science, cultural studies, and literary studies, the collection illustrates how postcolonial nationalism functions as a unifying mechanism of anti-colonial nation-building as well as a divisive force that can encourage discrimination and violence. Contributors: Natascha Bing, Prachi Gupta, Ralf Haekel, Kathrin Härtl, Idreas Khandy, Theresa Krampe, Lukas Lammers, Arhea Marshall, Hannah Pardey, Sina Schuhmaier, Hanna Teichler, Michael Westphal

During the tumultuous years of the English Revolution and Restoration, national crises like civil wars and the execution of the king convinced Englishmen that the end of the world was not only inevitable but imminent. National Reckonings shows how this widespread eschatological expectation shaped nationalist thinking in the seventeenth century. Imagining what Christ's return would mean for England's body politic, a wide range of poets, philosophers, and other writers—including Milton, Hobbes, Winstanley, and Thomas and Henry Vaughan,—used anticipation of the Last Judgment to both disrupt existing ideas of the nation and generate new ones. Ryan Hackenbracht contends that nationalism, consequently, was not merely a horizontal relationship between citizens and their sovereign but a vertical one that pitted the nation against the shortly expected kingdom of God. The Last Judgment was the site at which these two imagined communities, England and ecclesia (the universal church), would collide. Harnessing the imaginative space afforded by literature, writers measured the shortcomings of an imperfect and finite nation against the divine standard of a perfect and universal community. In writing the nation into end-times prophecies, such works as Paradise Lost and Leviathan offered contemporary readers an opportunity to participate in the cosmic drama of the world's end and experience reckoning while there was still time to alter its outcome.

Traumatic Tales: British Nationhood and National Trauma in Nineteenth-Century Literature explores intersections of nationalism and trauma in Romantic and Victorian literature from the emergence of British nationalism through the height of the British Empire. From the national tales of the early nineteenth century to the socially incisive realist novels that emerged later in the century, nationalism is inescapable in this literature, as much current scholarship acknowledges. Nineteenth-century national trauma, however, has only recently begun to be explored.Taking as its starting point the unsettling effects of nationalism, the essays in this collection expose the violence underlying empire-building, particularly in regard to subject identity. National violence—imperialism, colonialism and warfare—necessarily grounds nation-formation in deep-lying trauma. As the essays demonstrate, such fraught nexus are made visible in national tales as well as in political policy, exposed by means of theoretical and historical analyses to reveal psychological, political, social and individual trauma. This exploration of violence in the construction of national ideology in nineteenth-century Britain rethinks our understanding of cultural memory, national identity, imperialism, and colonialism, recent thrusts of Romantic and Victorian study in nineteenth-century literature.

Ireland is suffering from a crisis of authority. Catholic Church scandals, political corruption, and economic collapse have shaken the Irish people's faith in their institutions and thrown the nation's struggle for independence into question. While Declan Kiberd explores how political failures and economic globalization have eroded Irish sovereignty, he also sees a way out of this crisis. After Ireland surveys thirty works by modern writers that speak to worrisome trends in Irish life and yet also imagine a renewed, more plural and open nation.After Dublin burned in 1916, Samuel Beckett feared “the birth of a nation might also seal its doom.” In Waiting for Godot and a range of powerful works by other writers, Kiberd traces the development of an early warning system in Irish literature that portended social, cultural, and political decline. Edna O'Brien, Frank O'Connor, Seamus Heaney, and Michael Hartnett lamented the loss of the Irish language, Gaelic tradition, and rural life. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Eavan Boland grappled with institutional corruption and the end of traditional Catholicism. These themes, though bleak, led to audacious experimentation, exemplified in the plays of Brian Friel and Tom Murphy and the novels of John Banville. Their achievements embody the defiance and resourcefulness of Ireland's founding spirit—and a strange kind of hope.After Ireland places these writers and others at the center of Ireland's ongoing fight for independence. In their diagnoses of Ireland's troubles, Irish artists preserve and extend a humane culture, planting the seeds of a sound moral economy.

Ireland is suffering a crisis of authority. Catholic Church scandals, political corruption, and economic collapse have shaken the Irish people's faith in their institutions. The nation's struggle for independence is thrown into doubt. But, as Declan Kiberd argues in this engaging survey of post-war Irish literature, the country's creative writers have been alert to this reality from the start. He describes the young Samuel Beckett witnessing the burning of Dublin in 1916 and realising that'the birth of a nation might also seal its doom.'Surveying thirty works by modern Irish writers, Kiberd traces the response to the crisis of Irish Statehood in the work of Seamus Heaney, Edna O'Brien, Joseph O'Connor, Tom Murphy, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Derek Mahon and John Banville, among others. Placing these writers at the centre of Ireland's on-going exploration of the true meaning of freedom, Kiberd shows how Irish artists preserve and extend a humane culture that imagines a renewed, more plural and open nation. Kiberd's Inventing Ireland, originally published in 1995 is a dazzlingly ambitious critical history of modern Irish literature and the standard work on the Irish Literary Revival. In After Ireland, Kiberd responds to the next generation of Irish writers, in this second renaissance of Irish literature.

First published in 1985. What sort of poem is Don Juan, and how does it maintain its momentum through its long and often struggling narrative? These are the questions that Bernard Beatty proposes in this subtle and elegant discussion of Byron's masterwork. The legend of Don Juan was entrenched in European literature and other arts long before it came under Byron's hands, yet Byron's treatment of the story is often almost unrecognisably far from its forebears. Beatty indicates how deeply Byron has assimilated his predecessors in order to produce his own work. The sustained argument of this book raises questions of interest not only to students of Byron but of comedy in general, as well as of the place of religious motifs in apparently secularised modes.

James Joyce's Ulysses is a modern version of Homer's Odyssey, but Joyce—who was a better scholar of Latin than of Greek—also was deeply influenced by the Aeneid, Virgil's epic poem about the journey of Aeneas and the foundation of Rome. Joyce wrote Ulysses during the Irish War of Independence, when militants, politicians, and intellectuals were attempting to create a new Irish nation. Virgil wrote the Aeneid when, in the wake of decades of civil war, Augustus was founding what we now call the Roman Empire. Randall Pogorzelski applies modern theories of nationalism, intertextuality, and reception studies to illuminate how both writers confronted issues of nationalism, colonialism, political violence, and freedom during times of crisis.

In a world of conflicting nationalist claims, mass displacements and asylum-seeking, a great many people are looking for'home'or struggling to establish the'nation'. These were also important preoccupations between the English and the French revolutions: a period when Britain was first at war within itself, then achieved a confident if precarious equilibrium, and finally seemed to have come once more to the edge of overthrow. In the century and a half between revolution experienced and revolution observed, the impulse to identify or implicitly appropriate home and nation was elemental to British literature. This wide-ranging study by international scholars provides an innovative and thorough account of writings that vigorously contested notions and images of the nation and of private domestic space within it, tracing the larger patterns of debate, while at the same time exploring how particular writers situated themselves within it and gave it shape.

In-depth critical discussions of Rushdie's novel

Yeats, Shakespeare, and Irish Cultural Nationalism examines Yeats's writing on Shakespeare in the context of his work on behalf of the Irish Literary Revival. While Shakespeare's verse drama provides a source of inspiration for Yeats's poetry and plays, Yeats also writes about Shakespeare in essays and articles promoting the ideals of the Revival, and on behalf of Irish literary nationalism. These prose pieces reveal Yeats thinking about Shakespeare's art and times throughout his career, and taken together they offer a new perspective on the contours of Yeats's cultural politics. This book identifies three stages of Yeats's cultural nationalism, each of which appropriates England's national poet in an idiosyncratic manner, while reflecting contemporary trends in Shakespeare reception. Thus Yeats's fin-de-siécle Shakespeare is a symbolist poet and folk-artist whose pre-modern sensibility detaches him from contemporary English culture and aligns him with the inhabitants of Ireland's rural margins. Next, in the opening decade of the twentieth century, following his visit to Stratford to see the Benson history cycle, Yeats's work for the Irish National Theatre adopts an avant-garde, occultist stagecraft to develop an Irish dramatic repertoire capable of unifying its audience in a shared sense of nationhood. Yeats writes frequently about Shakespeare during this period, locating on the Elizabethan stage the kind of transformational emotional affect he sought to recover in the Abbey Theatre. Finally, as Ireland moves towards political independence, Yeats turns again to Shakespeare to register his disappointment with the social and cultural direction of the nascent Irish state. In each case, Yeats's thinking about Shakespeare responds to the remarkable conflation of aesthetic and religious philosophies constituting his cultural nationalism, thus making a unique case of Shakespearean reception. Taken together, Yeats's writings deracinate Shakespeare, and so contribute significantly to the process by which Shakespeare has come to be seen as a global artist, rather than a specifically English possession.

The application of postcolonial theories to Irish literature remains a contentious issue. Unlike other colonised nations, Ireland shared a long history of political, economic and artistic ties with its empire-building neighbour, Britain. Yet the Irish response to the project of British imperialism bears comparison with postcolonial models of the relationship between colonisers and the colonised. Writing from the Margins of Europe assesses the potential for postcolonial analysis of works by W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge and James Joyce. In this exploration of postcolonial parallels between these writers, the author focuses on four core issues: historiography, nationalism, language and displacement.

This book seeks to critically engage with issues arising out of, and hotly debated within, Indian writing in English and its ‘other': Bhasa writing. The central issue is the representation of nation in literary texts, which has divided these two literary traditions. At the heart of this book is a study of Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, which mirrors the newfound love of Indian writing in English for cosmopolitanism. Similarly, Buddhadeb Guha's Bhasa text Kojagar (translated in English as The Bounty of the Goddess by John W. Hood), is a text encapsulating Bhasa writing's fascination with unitary perspectives and structural aesthetics. The interrogation of these two texts is first grounded in a broad survey of perspectives on the nation arising out of the West and India and an exploration of the ways in which the nation is represented across the corpus of Indian writing in English and Bhasa writing. This exploration sets the scene for the examination of the two texts, which stresses the performative and ludic dimension of language, thus breaking each text into multiple, opposing perspectives. The textual instability of the two texts which emerges indicates the limitation of texts in maintaining the diametric perspectives inherent in categorization.

Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature connects changing seventeenth-century English views of maternal nurture to the rise of the modern nation, especially between 1603 and 1675. Maternal nurture gains new prominence in the early modern cultural imagination at the precise moment when England undergoes a major paradigm shift -- from the traditional, dynastic body politic, organized by organic bonds, to the post-dynastic, modern nation, comprised of symbolic and affective relations. The book also demonstrates that shifting early modern perspectives on Judeo-Christian relations deeply inform the period's interlocking reassessments of maternal nurture and the nation, especially in the case of Milton. The book's five chapters analyze a wide range of reformed and traditional texts, including A pitiless Mother, William Gouge's Of Domesticall Duties, Shakespeare's Macbeth, Charles I's Eikon Basilike, and Milton's Paradise Lost, and Samson Agonistes. Equal attention is paid to such early modern visual images as The power of women (a late sixteenth-century Dutch engraving), William Marshall's engraved frontispiece to Richard Braithwaite's The English Gentleman and Gentlewoman (1641), and Peter Paul Rubens's painting of Pero and Cimon or Roman Charity (1630). The book argues that competing early modern figurations of the nurturing mother mediate in politically implicated ways between customary biblical models of English kingship and innovative Hebraic/Puritan paradigms of Englishness.

The past century's culture wars that Britain has been consumed by, but that few North Americans seem aware of, have resulted in revised notions of Britishness and British literature. Yet literary anthologies remain anchored to an archaic Anglo-English interpretation of British literature. Conflicts have been played out over specific national vs. British identity (some residents prefer to describe themselves as being from Scotland, England, Wales, or Northern Ireland instead of Britain), in debates over immigration, race, ethnicity, class, and gender, and in arguments over British literature. These debates are strikingly detailed in such chapters as:'The Difficulty Defining'Black British',''British Jewish Writers'and'Xenophobia and the Booker Prize.'Connections are also drawn between civil rights movements in the U.S. and UK. This generalist cultural study is a lively read and a fascinating glimpse into Britain's changing identity as reflected in 20th and 21st century British literature.

The Politics of Nation formation in Twentieth-Century English-Indian Fiction: Kipling, Forster, Rao, Narayan, Anand, and Rushdie

The essays in this collection exemplify the relevance of bonds and borders in literature and contribute each in their own individual ways to the discourse between literary studies and Border studies. The scope of contributions ranges from revisiting older works from colonial times to discovering current narratives in post-9/11 literature; from the search for a national identity in Welsh poetry to self-transformation and the trans-cultural journeys of individuals in the literature of migration; and from the cosmopolitanism of Black Britain to gendered readings of Arab-American war narratives. Although not conceived and/or constructed as a whole, this collection gains particularly through disunity: topics cross over where one would least expect them to; borders are trespassed in order to give rise to new ideas and points of study. These essays by young researchers from a variety of disciplines and geographical backgrounds effectively work as a unit to dissect, subvert, challenge, or perhaps validate pre-conceived understandings of identity in an international society. They present a polydialectic approach to Literature and the supposedly borderless society of the Western world and its profound impact on individual identity.

Recently, the issue of postnationalism has encouraged intense debate, which has been reflected in the publication of numerous books and articles in various fields of study, including politics, history, philosophy and anthropology. However, the work produced in Irish literary criticism has been much sparser. This collection of essays aims to fill this gap and provide new insights into the debate on postnationalism in Ireland from the perspective of narrative writing. The book collects thirteen essays by academics from various countries, including Ireland, the United States and Sweden. It analyses the concepts of the postnational and the postnationalist in relation to globalisation, as well as the debate that postnationalist discourse has opened in various fields of knowledge, and its definitions and implications in the contemporary Irish historical and literary context. The literary forms under consideration include essay writing, drama, fiction, autobiography, film and poetry. The authors whose work is analysed here include Dermot Bolger, Hubert Butler, Ciaran Carson, Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Marie Jones, Derek Mahon, Frank McGuinness, Robert McLiam Wilson, Conor McPherson, Sinéad Morrissey, Nuala O'Faolain and David Wheatley.

This volume contains primary materials and introductory essays on the historical, critical and theoretical study of'national literature', focusing on the years 1550 – 1850 and the impact of ideas of nationhood from this period on contemporary literature and culture. The book is helpfully divided into three comprehensive parts. Part One contains a selection of primary materials from various English-speaking nations, written between the early modern and the early Victorian eras. These include political essays, poetry, religious writing, and literary theory by major authors and thinkers ranging from Edmund Spenser, Anne Bradstreet and David Hume to Adam Kidd and Peter Du Ponceau. Parts Two and Three contain critical essays by leading scholars in the field: Part Two introduces and contextualizes the primary material and Part Three brings the discussion up-to-date by discussing its impact on contemporary issues such as canon-formation and globalization. The volume is prefaced by an extensive introduction to and overview of recent studies in nationalism, the history and debates of nationalism through major literary periods and discussion of why the question of nationhood is important. Reading the Nation in English is a comprehensive resource, offering coherent, accessible readings on the ideologies, discourses and practices of nationhood. Contributors: Terence N. Bowers, Andrea Cabajsky, Sarah Corse, Andrew Escobedo, Andrew Hadfield, Deborah Madsen, Elizabeth Sauer, Imre Szeman, Julia M. Wright.

This study examines a selection of Chesterton's novels, poetry, and literary criticism and outlines the distinctive philosophy of history that emerges from these writings. Looking at Chesteron's relationship with and influence upon authors including William Cobbett, Sir Walter Scott, Belloc, Shaw, H.G. Wells, Christopher Dawson, Evelyn Waugh, and Marshall McLuhan, McCleary contends that Chesterton's recurring use of the themes of locality, patriotism, and nationalism embodies a distinctive understanding of what gives history its coherence. The study concludes that Chesterton's emphasis on locality is the hallmark of his historical philosophy in that it blends the concepts of free will, specificity, and creatureliness which he uses to make sense of history.

This book contains a multicultural and multifaceted study of ideologies and conflicts related to the complex realities and fictions of Nation and Identity represented in contemporary literature written in English. The history and present time of the United Kingdom, the British Empire and North America provide vast fields of research which have been explored by our selection of authors. Their interests range from the moral and personal consequences of modern nationalist conflicts to the memories of old racial confrontations on the British soil. Readers will find analyses and reflections on the individual's pursuit of identity in a challenging environment that covers more than two centuries of mainly Western civilization and abound in national dilemmas, social concerns, authoritarian legacies, and problematic postcolonial hybridizations. Short stories, novels, plays and poems by Irish, American, English, Nigerian, and Scottish writers will enable readers to consider the diverse approaches, propositions and debates the issues raised by Nation and Identity are being dealt with.

Seventeenth-century'English Literature'has long been thought about in narrowly English terms. Archipelagic English corrects this by devolving anglophone writing, showing how much remarkable work was produced in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and how preoccupied such English authors as Shakespeare, Milton, and Marvell were with the often fraught interactions between ethnic, religious, and national groups around the British-Irish archipelago. This book transforms our understanding of canonical texts from Macbeth to Defoe's Colonel Jack, but it also shows the significance of a whole series of authors (from William Drummond in Scotland to the Earl of Orrery in County Cork) who were prominent during their lifetimes but who have since become neglected because they do not fit the Anglocentric paradigm. With its European and imperial dimensions, and its close attention to the cultural make-up of early modern Britain and Ireland, Archipelagic English authoritatively engages with, questions, and develops the claim now made by historians that the crises of the seventeenth century stem from the instabilities of a state-system which, between 1603 and 1707, was multiple, mixed, and inclined to let local quarrels spiral into all-consuming conflict. This is a major, interdisciplinary contribution to literary and historical scholarship which is also set to influence present-day arguments about devolution, unionism, and nationalism in Britain and Ireland.

This collection of new essays addresses a key debate in Irish studies. While it is important that new research endeavours to accommodate the new and powerful manifestations of Irishness that are evident today in our globalised economy, these considerations are often overlooked. The writers in this book seek to reconcile the established critical perspectives of Irish studies with a forward-looking critical momentum that incorporates the realities of globalisation and economic migration. The book initiates this vital discussion by bringing together a series of provocative and thoughtful essays, from both renowned and rising international scholars, on the vicissitudes of cultural identity in a post-modern, post-colonial and post-national Ireland. By including work by leading scholars in the fields of film studies, migration and Diaspora studies, travel literature and gender studies, this collection offers a thorough twenty-first-century interrogation of Irishness and provides a timely fusion of international perspectives on Irish cultural identity.

In this innovative study Julia M. Wright addresses rarely asked questions: how and why does one colonized nation write about another? Wright focuses on the way nineteenth-century Irish writers wrote about India, showing how their own experience of colonial subjection and unfulfilled national aspirations informed their work. Their writings express sympathy with the colonised or oppressed people of India in order to unsettle nineteenth-century imperialist stereotypes, and demonstrate their own opposition to the idea and reality of empire. Drawing on Enlightenment philosophy, studies of nationalism, and postcolonial theory, Wright examines fiction by Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan, gothic tales by Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde, poetry by Thomas Moore and others, as well as a wide array of non-fiction prose. In doing so she opens up new avenues in Irish studies and nineteenth-century literature.

Scott's Shadow is the first comprehensive account of the flowering of Scottish fiction between 1802 and 1832, when post-Enlightenment Edinburgh rivaled London as a center for literary and cultural innovation. Ian Duncan shows how Walter Scott became the central figure in these developments, and how he helped redefine the novel as the principal modern genre for the representation of national historical life. Duncan traces the rise of a cultural nationalist ideology and the ascendancy of Scott's Waverley novels in the years after Waterloo. He argues that the key to Scott's achievement and its unprecedented impact was the actualization of a realist aesthetic of fiction, one that offered a socializing model of the imagination as first theorized by Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume. This aesthetic, Duncan contends, provides a powerful novelistic alternative to the Kantian-Coleridgean account of the imagination that has been taken as normative for British Romanticism since the early twentieth century. Duncan goes on to examine in detail how other Scottish writers inspired by Scott's innovations--James Hogg and John Galt in particular--produced in their own novels and tales rival accounts of regional, national, and imperial history. Scott's Shadow illuminates a major but neglected episode of British Romanticism as well as a pivotal moment in the history and development of the novel.

What is'English'about the English novel, and how has the idea of the English nation been shaped by the writers of fiction? How do the novel's profound differences from poetry and drama affect its representation of national consciousness? Nation and Novel sets out to answer these questions by tracing English prose fiction from its late medieval origins through its stories of rogues and criminals, family rebellions and suffering heroines, to the present-day novels of immigration. Major novelists from Daniel Defoe to the late twentieth century have drawn on national history and mythology in novels which have pitted Cavalier against Puritan, Tory against Whig, region against nation, and domesticity against empire. The novel is deeply concerned with the fate of the nation, but almost always at variance with official and ruling-class perspectives on English society. Patrick Parrinder's groundbreaking new literary history outlines the English novel's distinctive, sometimes paradoxical, and often subversive view of national character and identity. This sophisticated yet accessible assessment of the relationship between fiction and nation will set the agenda for future research and debate.

The Infinite Longing for Home is a groundbreaking study of Ben Okri's and K.S. Maniam's literary problematization of ‘home'in relation to subjectivity and the nation within and beyond the context of Nigeria and Malaysia. Drawing on Lacan, Žižek, Laclau and Mouffe, and weaving through history, politics, philosophy and literature, this book critically examines the motives and means by which peoples forced to live together in a country love and hate each other, and overlook the truths about themselves, their actions and beliefs. It looks into why some embrace heterogeneity and open-endedness while others are internally compelled to over-identify passionately with their religion and race, and to posit theirs as irreducibly distinct from and superior to others'. The Infinite Longing for Home also traces through Okri's and Maniam's writings a way out of today's political aporia, a path to the re-creation of a new society humbled and unified by the recognition of its participation in flawed humanity.

The debate over whether religious or secular identities provide the most viable model for a wider national identity has been a continuous feature of Indian politics from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Moreover, in the last thirty years the increasingly communal articulation of popular politics and the gradual rise of a constellation of Hindu nationalist parties headed by the BJP has increased the urgency of this debate. While Indian writing in English has fostered a long tradition of political dissent, and has repeatedly questioned ethnocentric, culturally exclusive forms of political identification, few critics have considered how this literature engages directly with communalism, or charted the literary-political response to key events such as the Babri Masjid / Ramjanmabhumi affair and the recent growth of popular forms of Hindu nationalism. The essays collected in Alternative Indias break new ground in studies of Indian literature and film by discussing how key authors offer contending, ‘alternative'visions of India and how poetry, fiction and film can revise both the communal and secular versions of national belonging that define current debates about ‘Indianness'. Including contributions from international scholars distinguished in the field of South Asian literary studies, and featuring an informative introduction charting the parallel developments of writing, the nation and communal consciousness, Alternative Indias offers a fresh perspective on the connections and discontinuities between culture and politics in the world's biggest democracy.

The Tudor era has long been associated with the rise of nationalism in England, yet nationalist writing in this period often involved the denigration and outright denial of Englishness. Philip Schwyzer argues that the ancient, insular, and imperial nation imagined in the works of writers such as Shakespeare and Spenser was not England, but Britain. Disclaiming their Anglo-Saxon ancestry, the English sought their origins in a nostalgic vision of British antiquity. Focusing on texts including The Faerie Queene, English and Welsh antiquarian works, The Mirror for Magistrates, Henry V and King Lear, Schwyzer charts the genesis, development and disintegration of British nationalism in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. An important contribution to the expanding scholarship on early modern Britishness, this study gives detailed attention to Welsh texts and traditions, arguing that Welsh sources crucially influenced the development of English literature and identity.

Nationalism and irony are two of the most significant developments of the Romantic period, yet they have not been linked in depth before now. This study shows how Romantic nationalism in Britain explored irony's potential as a powerful source of civic cohesion. The period's leading conservative voices, self-consciously non-English figures such as Edmund Burke, Walter Scott, and Thomas Carlyle, accentuated rather than disguised the anomalous character of Britain's identity, structure, and history. Their irony publicly fractured while upholding sentimental fictions of national wholeness. Britain's politics of deference, its reverence for tradition, and its celebration of productivity all became not only targets of irony but occasions for its development as a patriotic institution. This study offers a different view of both Romantic irony and Romantic nationalism: irony is examined as an outgrowth of commercial society and as a force that holds together center and periphery, superiors and subordinates, in the culture of nationalism.

Many non-Indian readers find the historical and cultural references in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children demanding. In his close reading of the novel, Neil ten Kortenaar offers post-colonial literary strategies for understanding Midnight's Children that also challenge some of the prevailing interpretations of the novel. Using hybridity, mimicry, national allegory, and cosmopolitanism, all key critical concepts of postcolonial theory, ten Kortenaar reads Midnight's Children as an allegory of history, as a Bildungsroman and psychological study of a burgeoning national consciousness, and as a representation of the nation. He shows that the hybridity of Rushdie's fictional India is not created by different elements forming a whole but by the relationship among them. Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children also makes an original argument about how nation-states are imagined and how national consciousness is formed in the citizen. The protagonist, Saleem Sinai, heroically identifies himself with the state, but this identification is beaten out of him until, in the end, he sees himself as the Common Man at the mercy of the state. Ten Kortenaar reveals Rushdie's India to be more self-conscious than many communal identities based on language: it is an India haunted by a dark twin called Pakistan; a nation in the way England is a nation but imagined against England. Mistrusting the openness of Tagore's Hindu India, it is both cosmopolitan and a specific subjective location.

This book describes a major literary culture caught in the act of becoming minor. In 1939, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary,'Civilisation has shrunk.'Her words captured not only the onset of World War II, but also a longer-term reversal of national fortune. The first comprehensive account of modernism and imperialism in England, A Shrinking Island tracks the joint eclipse of modernist aesthetics and British power from the literary experiments of the 1930s through the rise of cultural studies in the 1950s. Jed Esty explores the effects of declining empire on modernist form--and on the very meaning of Englishness. He ranges from canonical figures (T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf) to influential midcentury intellectuals (J. M. Keynes and J.R.R. Tolkien), from cultural studies pioneers (Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson) to postwar migrant writers (George Lamming and Doris Lessing). Focusing on writing that converts the potential energy of the contracting British state into the language of insular integrity, he argues that an anthropological ethos of cultural holism came home to roost in late-imperial England. Esty's interpretation challenges popular myths about the death of English literature. It portrays the survivors of the modernist generation not as aesthetic dinosaurs, but as participants in the transition from empire to welfare state, from metropolitan art to national culture. Mixing literary criticism with postcolonial theory, his account of London modernism's end-stages and after-lives provides a fresh take on major works while redrawing the lines between modernism and postmodernism.

This study argues that it is only through its epistemological perspective that nationalism can be properly analyzed. It goes on to offer such an analysis, utilizing the work of Jacques Lacan. This study contents that the captation of the self by a reflected, two-dimensional image of that self is the sine qua non of the epistemology of nationalism, as a sense of group selfhood is defined performatively through this process. The strong connections between nationalism and religion are examined Finally, the supposed difference between political nationalism and ‘cultural nationalism'is interrogated.

Ina Ferris examines the way in which the problem of'incomplete union'generated by the formation of the United Kingdom in 1800 destabilised British public discourse in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Ferris offers the first full-length study of the chief genre to emerge out of the political problem of Union: the national tale, an intercultural and mostly female-authored fictional mode that articulated Irish grievances to English readers. Ferris draws on current theory and archival research to show how the national tale crucially intersected with other public genres such as travel narratives, critical reviews and political discourse. In this fascinating study, Ferris shows how the national tales of Morgan, Edgeworth, Maturin, and the Banim brothers dislodged key British assumptions and foundational narratives of history, family and gender in the period.

Arthur Conan Doyle is often perceived as the quintessential Englishman, patriotically devoted to the Crown and the empire's defender and apologist. But such a relegation is both limiting and simplistic. Born in Scotland to Irish Catholic parents, Doyle's heritage is complex. His paternal grandfather, John Doyle, had originally left Ireland for London in the early 19th century; his father was committed to the cause of Irish separatism; and his uncle resigned from his position as main cartoonist for ^IPunch^R after the journal launched an attack on the Pope. Consequently, British imperialism, Irish nationalism, and Catholic allegiance converge uneasily in his works.This book examines the resulting tensions between imperialism and colonialism in his writings. It argues that his thematic obsessions with topography, race, psyche, and sexuality stem from his ambivalence toward his own heritage. The volume repositions Doyle and redresses current critical approaches that have seen him solely as the advocate of empire and have ignored his colonial background. It explores how his fictions occur within a colonial context, the complexity of which is evident in gothic tropes of shifting landscapes, disguised criminalities, spiritualism, and sexual anomalies and conflicts.

In this book, Mary Jean Corbett explores fictional and non-fictional representations of Ireland's relationship with England throughout the nineteenth century. Through postcolonial and feminist theory, she considers how cross-cultural contact is negotiated through tropes of marriage and family, and demonstrates how familial rhetoric sometimes works to sustain, sometimes to contest the structures of colonial inequality. Analyzing novels by Edgeworth, Owenson, Gaskell, Kingsley, and Trollope, as well as writings by Burke, Carlyle, Engels, Arnold, and Mill, Corbett argues that the colonizing imperative for'reforming'the Irish in an age of imperial expansion constitutes a largely unrecognized but crucial element in the rhetorical project of English nation-formation. By situating her readings within the varying historical and rhetorical contexts that shape them, she revises the critical orthodoxies surrounding colonial discourse that currently prevail in Irish and English studies, and offers a fresh perspective on important aspects of Victorian culture.

To understand the cultural history of England during the Restoration, one need look no further than the theater, which was attended by the gentry as well as by members of the middle and lower classes. The theater of this period embodied the values, meanings, and power relations of Restoration England. In Heroes and States, Douglas Canfield argues that drama not only represents but actually helps constitute the value and belief systems of an entire culture.Heroes and States completes Canfield's two-volume cultural history of Restoration drama, begun in Tricksters and Estates: On the Ideology of Restoration Comedy. In this second volume Canfield shows how Restoration playwrights attempted to rein scribe late-feudal aristocratic ideology after the English Civil War.In the serious drama of the period, conflict is between noble heroes, upon whom states are built, and transgressors of the established order—tyrants, traitors, usurpers, rapists, and atheists. Canfield considers several sub genres of tragedy. He argues that most of these sub genres reaffirm the older ideology after testing it in the fires of conflict. Tragical satire, on the other hand, the most subversive of these sub genres, exposes the failure of the ruling class to live up to its own codes and, in some cases, the absurdity of the codes themselves.Canfield also finds playwrights struggling with issues of race and colonialism. He uses the work of modern theorists such as Bakhtin, Girard, Kristeva, Derrida, Althusser, Williams, and Eagleton to illuminate aspects of his inquiries. Restoration tragedy stands on the cusp of a cultural transition from a late feudal to an early bourgeois ideology, and the issues and themes addressed in the theater validate the culture and politics of seventeenth-century England.

The nature of political prophecy in the middle ages analysed, confirming its importance in the discussion of public affairs.In this first general survey of political prophecy in medieval England for almost a hundred years, Lesley Coote examines the nature of political prophecy, its audience and its reception. She compares the discourse of prophecy withother, related discourses, and demonstrates how it functioned as a political language. A study of extant manuscripts produces an account of the importance of political prophecy in later medieval England, from its emergence in thetwelfth century to the end of the middle ages. What emerges from this study is a political language which was neither peripheral to English political consciousness, nor merely a game for intellectuals, but a major language for the discussion of public affairs. In this language were presented ideas of'Englishness'and the aspirations of a'national'community, which included the imminent revelation of a great crusading hero-ruler, a second Arthur, who would lead his people into the Last Days. The book is completed with a handlist of manuscripts containing political prophecies. Dr LESLEY A. COOTE is a Research Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Hull.Valuable research tool: Handlist of manuscripts containing political prophecies.

Angela Keane addresses the work of five women writers of the 1790s and its problematic relationship with the canon of Romantic literature. Refining arguments that women's writing has been overlooked, Keane examines the more complex underpinnings and exclusionary effects of the English national literary tradition. The book explores the negotiations of literate, middle-class women such as Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams and Ann Radcliffe with emergent ideas of national literary representation. As women were cast into the feminine, maternal role in Romantic national discourse, women like these who defined themselves in other terms found themselves exiled - sometimes literally - from the nation. These wandering women did not rest easily in the family-romance of Romantic nationalism nor could they be reconciled with the models of literary authorship that emerged in the 1790s.

The three essays constituting this volume were originally published as individual pamphlets by the Field Day Theatre Company, in Derry, Northern Ireland. Each deals with the question of nationalism and the role of cultural production as a force in understanding and analyzing the aftermath of colonization. The authors'diverse perspectives are demonstrated by the essays'respective titles: Eagleton, Nationalism: Irony and Commitment; Jameson, Modernism and Imperialism; and Said, Yeats and Decolonization. The essays have implication beyond their immediate topics, bearing upon questions of feminism, decolonization, and modernism to illuminate problems that belong to other groups and regions.

Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession presents the first comprehensive reading of the Marlowe canon in over a generation. The occasion for Patrick Cheney's rereading is a primary discovery: Marlowe organized his canon around an'Ovidian'career model, or cursus, which turns from amatory poetry to tragedy to epic. Ovid had advertised this cursus only in his inaugural poem, the Amores, where its purpose was to counter the Virgilian cursus of pastoral, georgic, and epic. Marlowe was the first writer to translate the Amores, and thus the first to make the Ovidian cursus literally his own. Marlowe inscribes this cursus not simply to participate in the Renaissance recovery of classical authors, but in particular to contest the national authority of the'Virgil of England,'Edmund Spenser. Using an Ovidian cursus to contest Spenser's Virgilian cursus, Marlowe enters the generational project of writing English nationhood. Unlike Spenser, however, Marlowe writes a'counter-nationhood'– a nonpatriotic form of nationhood that subverts royal power with what Ovid calls libertas. By discovering the original project organizing an otherwise fragmentary canon, Cheney aims to change the most basic lens through which critics have viewed Marlowe:'Shakespearean drama'. This lens cannot account for two of the most striking features of Marlowe's canon: his scholarly use of translation and his writing of epic. Cheney proposes that a theatrical, Shakespearean model has prevented critics from discovering the original context within which Marlowe produced his art: a multimedia, multi-genre Spenserian model of Ovidian counter-nationhood.