Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire: 2 (Literature in History) - Softcover

Trumpener, Katie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691044805 ISBN 13: 9780691044804

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1997

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

"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

"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

"Winner of the 1998 First Book Prize, Modern Language Association"

"Winner of the 1998 Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, British Academy"

From the Back Cover:

"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

About this edition

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0691044805
• ISBN 13: 9780691044804
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448