Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (review)

Given the unsatisfactory state of so much work on literary nationalism, it is a relief to come upon a book like Katie Trumpener's Bardic Nationalism. Comprehensive yet detailed, determined by data and local situations rather than by grand pronouncements, this work stands like a sunflower in the field of postcolonial studies, capable of surveying the land while implanted firmly in the soil. Her aim is not, as is the case of so many other books today, to reject nationalism as ethnocentrism or glorify it as resistance. Rather it is to dig below the present and the recent past to the roots of today's problems. As she herself argues, much postcolonial criticism deals with "self-consciously post-colonial writing" or it emphasizes the "Victorian period as the real imperial era," leaving in this way unexamined a significant body of literary work, "written both in Britain and in the colonies, which describes the experience of empire in terms of the transcolonial consciousness and transperipheral circuits of influence it creates" (288, 289). Rather than concentrate on the prominent examples of nineteenth-century British fiction, she looks into the prehistory of the novel, trying to explore in this way its involvement in the development of nationalism.

Her argument is that in the latter part of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries, linguists, poets, novelists, folklorists, and critics in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales began, largely in response to policies of Anglicization, to play an important role in shaping a national and historical consciousness among their peoples. In so doing, these antiquaries demonstrated both the damage brought from imperialism to their societies and also the oppositional strength of culture to resist homogenization. Reacting, for instance, to the attempt of authors such as Samuel Johnson to reject the authenticity of the poems of Ossian and question the whole Gaelic oral tradition, they undertook a program of cultural preservation and reconstruction. Out of their efforts emerged an entire oeuvre of national narratives, primarily tales of journey, marriage, and national character, which proved influential in the formation of realist fiction.

Trumpener's study of this period shows that nationalism in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland followed the same path as that of other European countries such as Finland, Greece, or Germany. (Her questionable claim [30] that cultural nationalisms in Britain actually served as a prototype for nationalist movements in Europe needs to be demonstrated.) A nationalist consciousness evolved among intellectual elites partly in response to the threat of foreign domination and the fear of cultural extinction. Whether we are talking about Finns' worries of being absorbed into Russia, the danger posed by Napoleon's armies in the German territories (not to mention the domination of French writing and manners in the German courts), or the drive by Greeks for independence from Ottoman control, the emphasis falls on culture as a mechanism for both preserving an identity and propelling their societies towards the future. In this sense, Trumpener rightly claims that nationalism, rather than a regression to the past and rejection of modernization, is an attempt to participate in progress. Although she does not explore this further, it means that culture is a productive impulse, capable of modifying social reality instead of simply reacting to it—as it is represented in most studies of nationalism.

This first part of her study demonstrates with much nuance the connection of culture (i.e., the novel) to society. Unlike, for instance, Edward Said's celebrated Cultural and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), which sets out to examine the relationship of culture to imperialism but in fact mostly analyzes novels, Trumpener does a lot of spade work. Whereas Said investigates the effects of literature by looking into literature itself, she examines the novel's social environment. Her analysis encompasses, among other things, national tales, literary texts, agricultural reform, travel writing, and...