Reading The Nation In English Literature

This volume contains primary materials and introductory essays on the historical, critical and theoretical study of "national literature", focusing on the years 1550 – 1850 and the impact of ideas of nationhood from this period on contemporary literature and culture. The book is helpfully divided into three comprehensive parts. Part One contains a selection of primary materials from various English-speaking nations, written between the early modern and the early Victorian eras. These include political essays, poetry, religious writing, and literary theory by major authors and thinkers ranging from Edmund Spenser, Anne Bradstreet and David Hume to Adam Kidd and Peter Du Ponceau. Parts Two and Three contain critical essays by leading scholars in the field: Part Two introduces and contextualizes the primary material and Part Three brings the discussion up-to-date by discussing its impact on contemporary issues such as canon-formation and globalization. The volume is prefaced by an extensive introduction to and overview of recent studies in nationalism, the history and debates of nationalism through major literary periods and discussion of why the question of nationhood is important. Reading the Nation in English is a comprehensive resource, offering coherent, accessible readings on the ideologies, discourses and practices of nationhood. Contributors: Terence N. Bowers, Andrea Cabajsky, Sarah Corse, Andrew Escobedo, Andrew Hadfield, Deborah Madsen, Elizabeth Sauer, Imre Szeman, Julia M. Wright.

Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series Beyond the Nation charts an expansive history of Filipino literature in the U.S., forged within the dual contexts of imperialism and migration, from the early twentieth century into the twenty-first. Martin Joseph Ponce theorizes and enacts a queer diasporic reading practice that attends to the complex crossings of race and nation with gender and sexuality. Tracing the conditions of possibility of Anglophone Filipino literature to U.S. colonialism in the Philippines in the early twentieth century, the book examines how a host of writers from across the century both imagine and address the Philippines and the United States, inventing a variety of artistic lineages and social formations in the process. Beyond the Nation considers a broad array of issues, from early Philippine nationalism, queer modernism, and transnational radicalism, to music-influenced and cross-cultural poetics, gay male engagements with martial law and popular culture, second-generational dynamics, and the relation between reading and revolution. Ponce elucidates not only the internal differences that mark this literary tradition but also the wealth of expressive practices that exceed the terms of colonial complicity, defiant nationalism, or conciliatory assimilation. Moving beyond the nation as both the primary analytical framework and locus of belonging, Ponce proposes that diasporic Filipino literature has much to teach us about alternative ways of imagining erotic relationships and political communities.

Publisher Description

A demonstration of how a specific ideal of national heritage was consciously nurtured by England's elementary school system at the turn of the century. Implicit within this ideal was an ideology that reinforced gender, class, and race distinctions.

Bhabha, in his preface, writes 'Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully encounter their horizons in the mind's eye'. From this seemingly impossibly metaphorical beginning, this volume confronts the realities of the concept of nationhood as it is lived and the profound ambivalence of language as it is written. From Gillian Beer's reading of Virginia Woolf, Rachel Bowlby's cultural history of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Francis Mulhern's study of Leaviste's 'English ethics'; to Doris Sommer's study of the 'magical realism' of Latin American fiction and Sneja Gunew's analysis of Australian writing, Nation and Narration is a celebration of the fact that English is no longer an English national consciousness, which is not nationalist, but is the only thing that will give us an international dimension.

Using the US as a case study, this study examines the public life of literature between the late 18th and the early 20th centuries, bringing together the development of literature's intellectual infrastructure, its operation in print culture, its changing status in higher education, and the surprisingly rich and interesting history of public literary culture.