Nationality as intersectional storytelling : inventing the 'Parisienne'

Nationality traditionally is one of imagology's key terms. In this article, I propose an intersectional understanding of this category, conceiving nationality as an interdependent dynamic. I thus conclude it to be always internally constructed by notions of gender, sexuality, race, class, religion, age, ability, and other identity categories. This complex and multi-layered construct, I argue, is formed narratively. To exemplify this, I analyse practices of stereotyping in Honoré de Balzac's "Illusions perdues" (1843) and Henry James's "The American" (1877) which construct the so-called 'Parisienne' as a synecdoche for nineteenth-century France.