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J ulia Wright has said that “Blake, in his own inimitable way, is articulating one of the fundamental precepts of the nationalism that emerged in Europe in the late eighteenth century, namely that culture is the tie that binds a nation together into a coherent , populist entity.” After examining the six novels of the preceding chapters closely, one sees that more than culture serves as the glue the novels concoct to bind together the ethnic nation. The debate over what the ethnic group is or should be and how its members should orient themselves towards their ethnicity, however, is conducted through literature, and so literature and nationalist ideology depend on one another here. I do not mean to imply that any of these works, in all their complexity, can simply be reduced to mouthpieces of a specific political position. Nonetheless, recurring themes pervade the novels, most prominently the oppositions of materialism and idealism and of individualism and communalism. These oppositions also play a role in the ethnic revisions of the Bildungsroman genre: in exhorting their protagonists to be more communalist —and more idealistic—than they initially want to be, these novels depart from the more individualist plotlines of their traditional counterparts. Genre-related and ideological matters are thus intertwined . One could think of the ideological formation of which the above oppositions are a part as a kind of background theme for these literary works that can always be heard, no matter what melody is played over it. Sometimes, this background theme will be in harmony with the melody, sometimes it will not. If it is in harmony, then it becomes a part of the melody; if not, the melody sets itself off against it. The predominant note this background theme sounds is nationalism. What nationalism is, how ethnic nationalism can be distinguished from Chapter Four Ethnic Nationalism and Ethnic Literary Responses Nations are Destroy’d, or Flourish, in proportion as Their Poetry Painting and Music, are Destroy’d or Flourish. (William Blake) it, and why ethnic nationalism and the ethnic Bildungsroman make a happy marriage is the story of this concluding chapter. I have shown how African American and Jewish American authors have revised the Bildungsroman, but in order to understand what makes ethnic nationalism ethnic, some features of European and U.S. American nationalism may prove a useful point of departure. Ethnic is a relational term, after all, and since both African Americans and Jewish Americans, through constant contact with European and European American developments, were likely to have been influenced by them, ethnic nationalism is, ultimately, a response to the ideological ferment surrounding and affecting the ethnic group. A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form. (Renan 19) This is how Ernest Renan defines the nation in 1882. Striking in this definition is the emphasis on both spirituality and volition. The shared past alone does not suffice to found a nation: only the conscious and willed continuation of that past can constitute “nationness.” The spiritual emphasis betrays the links of nationalism to Romanticism. While the earlier Enlightenment nationalism, as expressed by Rousseau, believed in the nation as a “social contract,” many nineteenth-century thinkers distanced themselves from rationalistic conceptualizations of the nation and turned to more mystical notions of national essences.1 Advocates of nationalist movements referred to the idea of a “national soul” (Urofsky 10) that was to supply the bond that would hold the nation together. While the “belief in the existence of a ‘national character ’ was present from the beginning of modern nationhood,” the attempt of Romantics to find an “organic” vision of life discarded the more universalist—at least in form—aspirations of the Enlightenment (Mosse 122).2 In the U.S., the universalist trappings of revolutionary rhetoric and the Declaration of Independence, while often claimed by ethnic writers, were also understood not to extend to them, so that a turning to ethnic nationalism can, in part, be understood as a response to such exclusion.3 ethnic nationalism and ethnic literary responses : 135 [18.117.183.49] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 19:53 GMT...

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