Home » Items tagged with 'national identity'
This collection of articles, which results from the ‘Four Nations Fiction’ conference that took place in 2013, is structured around the intersection of place with gender in terms of two vibrant research fields: the archipelagic or four nations turn within literary studies and the still-expanding map of Romantic-period women’s writing. Continue reading
This article shifts attention away from the perfections of England to explore the place of Ireland in Jane Austen’s Emma. Intrigued by Jane Fairfax’s refusal to travel with the Dixons in Ireland, Emma conjectures spitefully about an unrequited—or possibly consummated—affair between Jane and Mr Dixon. Obfuscating his actual affair with Jane, Frank Churchill uses Emma’s Irish conjectures to flirt with both women. Ireland becomes a repository of gothic potential over the course of Austen’s novel: a space upon which characters can map their unspoken and unspeakable desires. Austen accesses the Irish gothic to ask questions about national identity, legitimacy and power. Continue reading
The interplay between commerce and sensibility has been well documented: commercial activity is celebrated in eighteenth-century sentimental rhetoric for its ability to incite civility, reform manners and promote virtue. In the same way, the transformative effects of commerce informed discourses of sympathy and national identity throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century and into the Romantic period. This article considers Sydney Owenson’s focus on commercial improvement in post-union Ireland in her 1814 novel O’Donnel: A National Tale. As Owenson developed her formal experimentations with the national tale, she made a series of revisions to the 1812 edition of St Clair (originally published in 1803) in which she echoes contemporary political discussions about Ireland’s potential for trade through the navigation of its waterways, suggesting an emerging interest in Irish commercial progress that would go on to influence her subsequent novels. O’Donnel appraises the value of English schemes for Irish improvement in the form of canals, aqueducts and road building within the context of Enlightenment models of historical progress and sympathy. In doing so, Owenson provides an extended critique of ascendancy schemes of improvement and of the role of geography in the formation of Irish national identity, revealing a profound anxiety about both the ideological ‘mapping’ of the Irish landscape in the post-union period and the formation of international communities based on sympathetic identification. Continue reading
The domestic is fundamental to any analysis of Bray’s work, as by domesticating public history and antiquarianism she was able to negotiate a path between maintaining her position as a proper lady and asserting her credentials as a published author/ historian. Historically, Bray’s writing career began at a time when there had been a shift in the basic epistemological structures of history from state politics to social and affective life, family matters. Moreover, Bray’s own family, father, brother and both her husbands were antiquarians, thus her research was presented as an extension of theirs. Finally, in 1822, Bray relocated from London to Devon, a geographical space on the margins of England, and one rich in history, legend and the traditions of ‘Old England’. Yet for Bray, home was a conflicted term representing both family home and homeland, England, which she saw as under threat of losing its identity to the newly created nation of Great Britain and Ireland. In this paper I examine how, through the microcosm of family and region, Bray set about producing an antiquarian record of the English landscape, customs and traditions: an English National Tale. Continue reading
How did the stage help shape Britons’ understanding of the Napoleonic Wars? Susan Valladares’ Staging the Peninsular War: English Theatres 1807–1815 is a case study in this question. Focusing on the Peninsular War specifically, Valladares … Continue reading
I began reading Reinventing Liberty in the weeks leading up Britain’s Brexit vote in June 2016; the timing was uncanny. Price’s impressive monograph focuses on the concept of national identity as it relates to commerce … Continue reading
I have spent the ten months between my last post and this one developing my research on Egbert Martin, about whom I’ve written in the last couple of posts. As I’ve continued to fill in … Continue reading
by Emma Butcher The blow is struck—the lyre is shattered–the music is hushed at length. The greatest—the most various–the most commanding genius of modern times has left us to seek for that successor to his … Continue reading
‘British Romanticism’, writes Paul Youngquist in Race, Romanticism, and the Atlantic, ‘is white’ (p. 91). Youngquist’s volume interrogates this ideology of whiteness, critiquing its systematic erasure of the violence in and across the Black Atlantic … Continue reading
In 1802, James Hogg embarked on the first of three excursions into the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. The young Border shepherd hoped to advance himself by leasing a farm and thereby joining the increasing … Continue reading
How might it be possible, ask Evan Gottlieb and Juliet Shields in the introduction to Representing Place in British Literature and Culture, to ‘tell the whole story’ of the intersections of local, regional, national and … Continue reading
The theoretical rationale for the emergence of transatlantic literary studies has been the recognition of important missed connections under prior modes of critical study and the rectifying power of observing multiple global parties in conversation … Continue reading
by Manu Samriti Chander I began to discuss in my last post the Guyanese author Egbert Martin, specifically describing him as a Shelleyan, unacknowledged legislator. Though we know little about Martin’s life, it is believed … Continue reading
by Manu Samriti Chander Last time I brought up Shelley’s famous line at the end of the Defence of Poetry, suggesting that Derozio, like other brown Romantics, conceived of his position as a poet as … Continue reading
by Manu Samriti Chander I’ve mentioned my current book project, Brown Romantics, and I thought I’d take this opportunity to discuss one of the central issues that has come up as I’ve been researching and … Continue reading
by Helen Stark, Newcastle University In September 2013 I was lucky enough to spend 5 days in the Pforzheimer Collection at the New York Public Library, largely – despite the myriad treasures there – consulting … Continue reading
by Manu Samriti Chander I mentioned in my last post the Calcutta-born poet Henry Derozio (1809-1831), or “Indian Keats” as he has sometimes been called. I first discovered Derozio’s work in graduate school and planned … Continue reading
It is striking that the turn of the nineteenth century saw the earliest use—and swift adoption—of both autobiography and biology and their cognates in European languages. [1] Two very different disciplines of ‘life-writing’ that took … Continue reading
by Manu Samriti Chander When I started graduate school in the early 2000s, I planned to focus on postcolonial literatures, especially poetry, which at the time was relatively under-examined. Part of the reason for this … Continue reading
It’s not often that you get the chance to go to a conference which will involve a trip to the pier, a day spent at one of Wales’ national treasures, and introductions to several undeservedly-forgotten … Continue reading
In July, I travelled to Sydney to take part in the second biannual conference of the Romantic Studies Association of Australasia. Founded in 2010, the RSAA aims ‘to promote the study of the literary, artistic, … Continue reading
The essay looks at the masculine sporting culture that flourished in the 1820s, revolving in particular around the boxing world dubbed ‘The Fancy’. Focusing on the 1821 prizefight between Tom Hickman and Bill Neate, Snowdon examines the ways in which the event was depicted by the pens of William Hazlitt, Pierce Egan, and John Badcock. An extended discussion of the popular Boxiana series, which was first written by Egan, and then taken up by Badcock, before legal proceedings allowed Egan to publish once again under the Boxiana imprint. Continue reading
Did Ireland experience Romanticism? Certainly not in the uncomplicated way that scholarship assumes England, Germany and other countries did. In Romanticism in National Context (1988), Tom Dunne’s contribution eschews the standard chapter title form—‘Romanticism in … Continue reading
I James Henderson’s article ‘The Gothic Novel in Wales (1790–1820)’ provides a useful starting point for a study of Wales-related fiction of the romantic period. [1] Examining the extent to which Wales was used as … Continue reading
This essay provides an overview of patterns of reception and production of Irish fiction published between 1800 and 1829, with particular discussion of the fiction of Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan). The essay is followed by a bibliographical checklist of 114 works of fiction published during the survey period. Continue reading
I ‘Few poetic careers can have been more thoroughly devoted to the construction of national identity than was that of Felicia Hemans’s, writes Tricia Lootens, in her contribution to Angela Leighton’s Victorian Women Poets: A … Continue reading
I In 1826, Mary Shelley recalled the Summer of 1814 as ‘incarnate romance’, when ‘a new generation’ of youthful travellers with ‘time and money at command’, yet heedless of ‘dirty packets and wretched inns’, ‘poured, … Continue reading
In ‘Bibliomania: Book Collecting, Cultural Politics, and the Rise of Literary Heritage in Romantic Britain’, [1] Philip Connell argues that the decade of the 1810s saw the rise of diverse strains of bibliomania involving the … Continue reading
Let’s begin with an irritated Elizabeth Inchbald. At the bidding of prolific and insistent publisher Thomas Norton Longman, she undertook the task of collecting and critiquing a series of plays spanning the two centuries between … Continue reading
