Traumatic Tales: British Nationhood and National Trauma in Nineteenth-Century Literature ed. by Lisa Kasmer, and: Postcolonial George Eliot by Oliver Lovesey (review)

Traumatic Tales: British Nationalism and National Trauma in Nineteenth-Century Literature, a collection edited by Lisa Kasmer, and Postcolonial George Eliot, a monograph by Oliver Lovesey, differ substantially in scope, but share the goal of negotiating across disciplines to situate nineteenth-century literature within the overwhelming yet quotidian trauma of an expanding empire.

Traumatic Tales insightfully explores intersections between individual and national identity during the nineteenth-century expansion of British empire. The collection examines national and imperial trauma in varied textual, geographical, and historical locations, recognizing the fraught interdependence of the personal and political in national, regional, and ethnic identities under colonialism. It focuses predominantly on a colonial rather than colonized subject's perspective, although Amy E. Martin's and Anne Frey's contributions are notable exceptions. The broad coverage of Traumatic Tales spans the Romantic era through the fin de siècle; it includes chapters on varied genres including realist and gothic fiction, poetry and the essay, and news media reportage.

Such a diffuse scope allows a range of fresh and suggestive individual essays but results in a loose thematic organization. The two chapters within the first section, "National Trauma/National Culture," both concern patterns of individual and cultural memory. Diane Long Hoeveler examines historical memory as articulated through nineteenth-century linguistic memorializations of nationhood, including literature. Drawing upon Sigmund Freud's theories of neurosis and trauma, Hoeveler provocatively considers what we might learn by regarding the modernizing nation "not as a reasonable individual, but as a neurotic one," "damaged and dangerous" from repeated traumas (22). Ivan Ortiz explores the intersection of individual accident trauma with national nostalgia in Thomas De Quincey's "The English Mail-Coach" (1849), an essay published shortly after the obsolescence of this once-ubiquitous delivery method for news and correspondence, which Ortiz calls "a national vehicle for affective transmission" (35).

The second section, "Reimagining National and Colonial Trauma," takes up the psychic trauma of British nationalism as it affects those in disempowered positions. Kasmer's contribution productively dialogues with Edward Said's influential analysis of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814), drawing upon the theory of Paul Ricoeur to read the novel as a narrative of Fanny Price's national as well as personal identity formation. The marginalized poor relation's self-construction, Kasmer argues, demands selective forgetting of instances of exclusion, liminality, and degradation in the home of her aristocratic cousins. Frey similarly takes a single novel as a model of broader sociocultural patterns in her analysis of Lady Morgan's Florence Macarthy (1818), a fiction that formulates a new Irish identity in the wake of systemic oppression. This text, Frey suggests, demonstrates the ways in which pre-Freudian trauma narrative, which recognizes repeated injuries and envisions transformation, might more effectively articulate the experience of colonized peoples than do twentieth-century theories, which focus on the catastrophic and on returns of the past. Martin's chapter contrasts mainstream British with Irish nationalist descriptions of the Sepoy Rebellion. Martin shows that whereas the British press employed sensationalism to produce a trauma response that "rationalizes imperialism and counterinsurgency as well as [reinforces] racism," Irish accounts of that conflict and the subsequent Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica instead developed identification with the colonized subject, deploying the literary techniques of gothic horror to remind readers of the longstanding violence colonial rule inflicted upon bodies of the colonized (98).

The third section, "Trauma at Home," engages with mental distress experienced by the colonizer. Katherine J. Anderson investigates conflicting codes of behavior at work in the violent actions and subsequent psychological reactions of British military men who committed atrocities in Morant Bay: on the one hand, military habitus conditioned their compliance with orders and condoned martial violence, and on the other...