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Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire

Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire This is a work of quite remarkable ambition and sweep that sets out to rethink the literary history of early British romanticism by relocating its focus to the Anglo-Celtic peripheries and extending it to the overseas colonies linked to those peripheries. The book thus participates in the current displacement of England and London from the field formerly known as English literature, but few books written under the aegis of this postcolonizing impetus demonstrate either the depth of historical knowledge or the critical generosity apparent both in Katie Trumpener’s text and in the more than one hundred pages of notes and bibliography. The latter alone are worth the price of the volume. But they constitute more than an invaluable research record; they also make a major point. In the very thickness of historical research and knowledge to which they attest, they underline Trumpener’s argument about the importance of tracing precise genealogies for the genres and categories we think we understand. In particular, as Trumpener suggests in her conclusion, postcolonial criticism too often leaps over colonial history, assuming that categories like “globalization” and “transcolonial” are new conditions rather than new inflections of formations inherent in the structure of empire. Even http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History Duke University Press

Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire

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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 1998 by University of Washington
ISSN
0026-7929
eISSN
1527-1943
DOI
10.1215/00267929-59-3-388
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

This is a work of quite remarkable ambition and sweep that sets out to rethink the literary history of early British romanticism by relocating its focus to the Anglo-Celtic peripheries and extending it to the overseas colonies linked to those peripheries. The book thus participates in the current displacement of England and London from the field formerly known as English literature, but few books written under the aegis of this postcolonizing impetus demonstrate either the depth of historical knowledge or the critical generosity apparent both in Katie Trumpener’s text and in the more than one hundred pages of notes and bibliography. The latter alone are worth the price of the volume. But they constitute more than an invaluable research record; they also make a major point. In the very thickness of historical research and knowledge to which they attest, they underline Trumpener’s argument about the importance of tracing precise genealogies for the genres and categories we think we understand. In particular, as Trumpener suggests in her conclusion, postcolonial criticism too often leaps over colonial history, assuming that categories like “globalization” and “transcolonial” are new conditions rather than new inflections of formations inherent in the structure of empire. Even

Journal

Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary HistoryDuke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 1998

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