Bardic nationalism: The Romantic novel and the British Empire

Abstract

This work links the literary and intellectual history of Britain and its Empire during the late-18th and early-19th centuries to redraw the picture of the origins of cultural nationalism, the lineages of the novel and the literary history of the English-speaking world. During the late-18th century, antiquaries in Ireland, Scotland and Wales answered modernization and anliciziation inititatives with nationalist arguments for cultural preservation. Responding in particular to Englightenment dismissals of Gaelic oral traditions, they reconceived national and literary history under the sign of the bard. Their path-breaking models of national and literary history, their new way of reading national landscapes and their debates about tradition and cultural transmission shaped a succession of new novelistic genres, from Gothic and sentimental fiction, to the nationalist tale and the historical novel. In Ireland and Scotland, these genres were used to mount nationalist arguments for cultural specificity and against internal colonization; yet, once exported throughout the Empire, they also formed the basis of the first colonial fiction of Canada, Australia and British India, used not only to attack imperialism, but also to justify the imperial project.