Internal Colonialism and the British Novel

INTERNAL COLONIALISM Internal Colonialism and the British Novel Janet Sorensen In the wake of recent studies of British national cultural formations and, increasingly, their relationship to colonial practices, the concept of internal colonialism has garnered increased attention . Defined in Michael Hechter's seminal study as "the political incorporation of culturally distinct groups by the core," internal colonialism addresses the process by which, in the crucible of nation building and its organization of a competitive domestic economy, a national core expands, subsuming "peripheral" geographic zones.1 This territorial annexation, however, also propels a political and cultural exclusion. In Hechter's initial application of the concept to Britain's "Celtic periphery," he demonstrates the Anglo-British core's systematic economic underdevelopment of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.2 Often referred to as the "training ground" for the repressive practices of its overseas empire, Britain's internal colonies were subject to similar methods of political control and manoeuvres ofcultural suppression and appropriation.3 Attention to the political and cultural dynamics ofinternal colonialism has important implications for the ways in which we read eighteenth-century fiction, and a 1 Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The CeUicFringe in British NationalDevelopment (Berkeley : California University Press, 1975), p. 32. 2 Linda Colley, however, argues convincingly that his characterization of the Celtic fringe as homogeneous flattens out important distinctions. Britons: Forging the Nation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 12. 3 See Cauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); and Sue Zemka, Victorian Testaments (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 15, Number 1, October 2002 54EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION number ofground-breaking recent studies, from Katie Trumpener's BardicNationalism to Leith Davis's Acts ofUnion, have undertaken analyses of the role internal colonialism has played in shaping British literary production.4 The three essays that follow explore the significance of internal colonialism, particularly in the Scottish context, for understanding the novel form and specific novels of the mideighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. These studies of internal colonialism and the novel supplement die excellent work already carried out from a postcolonial perspective interested in rereading British cultural productions for the colonial relationships to which they overtly or tacitly refer. If the territorial expropriation and regional underdevelopment of internal colonialism resemble the techniques of imperial domination, the promotion of such activities within expanding national borders throws the instability of the inside/outside binary opposition so crucial to nationalist discourse into particularly high relief. MaryJean Corbett has pointed to the ways an internal colonial approach reveals the "otherness even of ... putative insiders in a British context."5 And, as Eva Cherniavsky writes, the "internalization of 'extra-territorial' spaces and extroversion of colonized peoples ... is ... the figure of bourgeois culture delimited not at its periphery, but at its center."6 The fault lines ofmodern bourgeois national culture are most apparent in the internal colonial relationship because, considered "other" in the interest of legitimating their political and economic domination , the internally colonized must, perversely, be seen as leaving the continuity of the national culture intact. The three essays ofthis cluster, which pursue the tensions revealed in the novel specifically as a national form, reconsider novels—and 4 Katie Trumpener, BardicNationalism: TheRomantic Noveland British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Leith Davis, Acts ofUnion: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation ofthe British Nation 1 707-1830 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). See also the special issue on Scott, Scotland, and Romantic Nationalism.Siurfi« in Romanticism 40 (2001); James Buzard, "Translation and Tourism: Scott's Waverley and the Rendering of Culture," YateJournal ofCriticism ? (1995), 31-59; Ina Ferris, "Translation form the Borders: Encounters and Recalcitrance in Waverley and Clan-Albion, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9 ( 1997), 20322 ;Janet Sorensen, The Grammar ofEmpire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and MaryJean Corbett, Allegories ofUnion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 5 MaryJean Corbett, "Another Tale to Tell: Postcolonial Theory and the Case of Castle Rackrent ," Crilicism$6 (1994), 398. 6 Eva Cherniavsky, "Subaltern Studies in a U.S. Frame," Boundary 2, 23 (1996), 86. INTERNAL COLONIALISM AND THE BRITISH NOVEL 55 their textual and extra-textual contexts—in the period ofa coterminous "rise" ofnations and novels in Britain in the...