Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire

by Katherine M Trumpener

Overview

This magisterial work links the literary and intellectual history of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Britain's overseas colonies during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to redraw our picture of the origins of cultural nationalism, the lineages of the novel, and the literary history of the English-speaking world. Katie Trumpener recovers and recontextualizes a vast body of fiction to describe the history of the novel during a period of formal experimentation and political engagement, between its eighteenth-century "rise" and its Victorian "heyday."


During the late eighteenth century, antiquaries in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales answered modernization and anglicization initiatives with nationalist arguments for cultural preservation. Responding in particular to Enlightenment dismissals of Gaelic oral traditions, they reconceived national and literary history under the sign of the bard. Their pathbreaking models of national and literary history, their new way of reading national landscapes, and their debates about tradition and cultural transmission shaped a succession of new novelistic genres, from Gothic and sentimental fiction to the national tale and the historical novel. In Ireland and Scotland, these genres were used to mount nationalist arguments for cultural specificity and against "internal colonization." Yet once exported throughout the nascent British empire, they also formed the basis of the first colonial fiction of Canada, Australia, and British India, used not only to attack imperialism but to justify the imperial project. Literary forms intended to shore up national memory paradoxically become the means of buttressing imperial ideology and enforcing imperial amnesia.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691223247
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	01/12/2021
Series:	Literature in History , #2
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	447
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

Katie Trumpener is Associate Professor of English, Germanic Studies, and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Harps Hung upon the Willow	3
Ch. 1	The Bog Itself: Enlightenment Prospects and National Elegies	37
Ch. 2	The End of an Auld Sang: Oral Tradition and Literary History	67
Ch. 3	National Character, Nationalist Plots: National Tale and Historical Novel in the Age of Waverley, 1806-1830	128
Ch. 4	Coming Home: Imperial and Domestic Fiction, 1790-1815	161
Ch. 5	The Old Wives' Tale: The Fostering System as National and Imperial Education	193
Ch. 6	The Abbotsford Guide to India: Romantic Fictions of Empire and the Narratives of Canadian Literature	242
Notes	293
Select Bibliography	367
Index	411

What People are Saying About This

Ian Duncan

This is an impressively ambitious and assured piece of work that will become one of the indispensable books on the British novel. Thematically rich, conceptually powerful, full of surprising illuminations, Bardic Nationalism succeeds in redefining one of the crucial, contested fields in current literary historiography. Trumpener writes a lucid, sinewy prose, capable of feats of intelligent compression and analytical precision.
— Ian Duncan, University of Oregon

From the Publisher

"This is an impressively ambitious and assured piece of work that will become one of the indispensable books on the British novel. Thematically rich, conceptually powerful, full of surprising illuminations, Bardic Nationalism succeeds in redefining one of the crucial, contested fields in current literary historiography. Trumpener writes a lucid, sinewy prose, capable of feats of intelligent compression and analytical precision."—Ian Duncan, University of Oregon

Editorial Reviews

Winner of the 1998 Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, British Academy

Winner of the 1998 First Book Prize, Modern Language Association

From the Publisher

"Bardic Nationalism is an ambitious, important survey that encompasses different genres (statistical survey, travel literature, Gothic fiction, national tale, historical novel, diaristic chronicle), different historical periods (late-eighteenth-century, Romantic, Victorian, even contemporary), and different national literatures (Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Australian, Canadian)."

Nineteenth-Century Literature