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

Abstract

REVIEWS 239 have its excellent moments and fine insights, is crippling, a serious undermining of whatever authority Brown's readers will feel he has been able to muster. Which is not much. Jerry C. Beasley University of Delaware Katie Trumpener. Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. xviii + 426pp. US$55.00 (cloth); US$19.95 (paper). ISBN 0-691-04481-3. Katie Trumpener's vastly ambitious book attempts "to redraw our picture of the origins of cultural nationalism, the lineages of the novel, and the early literary history of the English-speaking world. In the process, it argues implicitly for the disciplinary transformation of English literature, so called, and for a new way of conceiving the disciplinary mandate ofcomparative literature" (p. xi). Whether or not the reader grants the full success ofall these ambitions, this is ground-breaking work, one that will be a "citation classic" for some time to come. Consciously setting out to complement, specify, and correct Benedict Anderson's influential Imagined Communities, Trumpener opens the study of the Romantic novel in English to the methods, assumptions, and intents developed in the study of postcolonial literature. This aperture makes authors such as Walter Scott, John Gait, and Sydney Owenson current concerns in ways that they have not been for many years. (I assume I am not alone in the surprising experience of having graduate students working on contemporary Caribbean fiction knock at my door to discuss Guy Mannering.) Trumpener begins her study with the antiquarian revivalist figure of the bard and documents the opposed ways in which the figure was adopted and adapted by differing, contestatory groups in the as yet unimagined community of Great Britain. She distinguishes first the bard as figured in the writings of nationalists from Scotland, Wales, and Ireland from the bard of English writers: "Scottish, Welsh, and Irish nationalists conceive of a new national literary history under the sign of the bard, a figure who represents the resistance ofvernacular oral traditions to the historical pressures of English imperialism and whose performance brings the voices of the past into the sites of the present" (p. 33). In England, on the other hand, the bard becomes a figure for the sundered "organic character of literary life under feudal patronage" (p. 7) and, by inversion, for anxieties about the commodification of literary arts and the concomitant social marginalization of poets. The second crucial distinction is among the bardic nationalisms in cultural circulation in the early years ofthe nineteenth century: an old nationalism predicated on mourning what is more or less inevitably and irretrievably lost; a reactionary nationalism that refuses to accept loss and establishes a corollary longing 240 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 11:2 for a restored hierarchical stability under a national élite; a radical nationalism that merges nationalist consciousness with "Jacobin" political and economic critique . Trumpener's deployment of these three models especially as they manifest themselves in the multiple and coexisting discourses of the novel gives her analyses of individual texts an admirable suppleness and a keen insight into internal contradiction. Having established its ground, Trumpener's study proceeds to cases. Arthur Young's Tour in Ireland and Samuel Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland serve as occasions for considering the clash between the imperial centre and its protonationalistperipheries. Each discussion moves from discussing its key imperial text to surveying responses from Irish or Scottish writers. Hence Young yields to Edgeworth, Owenson, and Maturin; Johnson enters protesting against Macpherson's Ossian, then withdraws grudgingly to make way for Mackenzie, Elizabeth Ryves, and Scott. Scott is at the centre ofTrumpener's third chapter and, after the Introduction, the most important one. This is very much a contextually defined Scott, no longer seen as creating the historical novel out of scraps of gothic romance, popular history, national fictions, and antiquarian researches. Trumpener's historical novel emerges very specifically in the context of the national tale. It is here that Trumpener strives to employ formal notions of genre to bridge what she earlier frames as the disciplinary fissures deepened "during the 1980s, when Marxist literary history did battle with rhetorically oriented deconstruction" (p. xv). She argues that...