Nineteenth-century Nationalism Research Articles

Urban–ruraljustice

<scp>Urban–rural</scp>justice

Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom

Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom

Thinking with the Nation: "National" Literatures at the Cusp

Thinking with the Nation"National" Literatures at the Cusp Sukanya Banerjee (bio) Critical discussions of the nineteenth-century nation tend to be anachronistic inasmuch as we retrofit contemporary notions of the nation into nineteenth-century politico-cultural formations. One can be forgiven for this anachronistic move because nineteenth-century literary and cultural history bears ample evidence of the singularity with which the spirit of nationalism imbued itself in and through aesthetic and cultural practices, be it in Romantic imaginings or the literary artifact of the Victorian novel. However, it is worth noting that the object of nationalism—the nation—remained considerably opaque throughout the century. Incidentally, while the French Revolution is widely understood to mark the point at which state power begins to affix itself to national sentiment, the sovereign nation-state was hardly a ubiquitous phenomenon until about the mid-twentieth century.1 But it is also the case that the nation itself was quite amorphous over the course of the nineteenth century. Even as Walter Bagehot authored a definitive treatise on what is a key instrument of nationhood, the constitution (in this case, the English constitution), he also mused: "But what are nations?"2 The opacity of the nation arose not so much from its mutability (changing borders) but from the uncertainty regarding its organizing logic. What was the coherent element around which a community imagined itself? Was it language? Was it race? How much could one put store in territoriality, which, after all, could shift? As twenty-first century readers and scholars, we are all too familiar with the artifice of the nation, the fact of its constructedness. But so were thinkers in the nineteenth [End Page 84] century. What does it mean, then, to read this contingency back into the nineteenth century, when nations were are at various stages of making, nonmaking, and unmaking? How does such a chronologically apposite view impinge upon our otherwise unitary understanding of "national literature" or "national tradition" that a post–Second World War critical and political legacy has bequeathed us? How might revisiting the nation in the late nineteenth century, at the cusp, in fact, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reorient our thinking about the nation and the critical frameworks that it might generate? In addressing these questions, I want to consider analytical frameworks that might be apropos to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries given that this was a period that came in the wake of the Italian Risorgimento and German unification but also witnessed an upsurge in anticolonial agitation as well as colonial nationalisms that understood sovereignty and affiliation as nested, layered, and dispersed.3 The idea of the nation was very much in the air in Britain, too, where national sovereignty had been continually negotiated through franchise reform (the latest installment in 1882) and national identity found expression in patriotic jingoism attending the Boer wars. But the British nation was also inextricable from its empire, and if, as Hedinger and Hee point out, the tendency of "transnational history" is to "nationalize empires," such that "imperial history is read as the history of a nation-state beyond its borders,"4 then it is worth noting the inadequacy of the transnational as an analytical template in this context, not least because of the impossibility of reading the British nation as a discrete formation. In trying to read the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nation and the literatures and traditions that gathered under its rubric, it might be productive, instead, to consider theories of nation extant in the nineteenth century, which is to say, to read through the nineteenth century and with the Victorians—widely understood—rather than retrospectively superimpose our late twentieth- and twenty-first-century critical frameworks upon them. At one level, then, I am making a temporal argument about our reading of the nation, suggesting that while we tend to read back into the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nation and its literatures and cultures, we should focus instead on the nineteenth century and use that as a basis for reading [End Page 85] forward. Evidently, the famed temporal paradoxes of the nation inflect our reading habits, as well. But why focus on the...

Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism, by Dinyar Patel

Biography is a curiously under-used genre in Indian academic history (in marked contrast to Indian popular history and cinema, where biography and biopics continue to thrive). Whether this absence is because of a dearth of sources, a theoretical scepticism of methods that assume a fundamental unity and narrative coherence of individual lives, or because Indian historians, as Dinyar Patel mordantly puts it, ‘are very prone to the vagaries of academic fashion [and] have been loath to accept biography as a legitimate form of scholarship’ (p. 10), is difficult to say. Whatever the reason may be, there are few biographies of modern Indian figures beyond the now classic studies of canonical nationalist leaders such as Gandhi or Jinnah, a fact that represents a significant gap in the field. Patel’s meticulously researched and elegantly written biography of Dadabhai Naoroji (1825–1917) provides an admirable model of what this genre can offer to the field of modern Indian history. In doing so, the book also narrates a fascinating transnational account of Indian nationalism and wider British imperial politics in the long nineteenth century.

Chopin’s Żydek, and Other Apocryphal Tales

Music scholars, critics, and popular writers have for generations told and retold the same tale about Fryderyk Chopin: namely, that the teenaged composer encountered Jewish folk musicians during his visits to the Polish countryside, was fascinated by their music, and even occasionally performed it. Our article endeavors to counter this and similar misconceptions about Chopin's connections to Jews and Jewish folk music, drawing on an array of historical, ethnographic, and literary sources previously discounted or overlooked by Chopin scholars, and freshly reexamining the composer's earliest correspondence. Having established an absence of primary documentation corroborating oft-repeated anecdotes about the young Chopin's interactions with Jewish music makers, we argue that the “Jewish tales” tenaciously clinging to the composer's biography reflect narratives rooted in later nineteenth-century nationalist rhetoric, anachronistic misreadings of Polish-Jewish relations, and unchallenged reliance on precedent writing. Finally, we offer a sampling of the folk and popular music Chopin would likely have heard, performed, and described to his family, citing material sourced from the work of the pioneering Polish ethnographer, and Chopin family friend, Oskar Kolberg.

Synchronous nationalisms – reading the history of nationalism in South–Eastern Europe between and beyond the binaries

ABSTRACT This article argues that historicising the evolution of nineteenth century nationalisms in South-Eastern Europe allows us to undermine not only binary understandings of nationalism, but also the essentialist reification of a single ideal type as a dominant or exclusive manifestation of nationalism. It draws attention to the competing nationalisms that can be encountered in the area during this period, varying across the spatial and temporal axes, as well as in their espousal by certain groups within the same ‘nation’. The article challenges notions of a temporal lag, constitutive of binary interpretations that identify a fundamental difference between ‘East’ and ‘West’.

The Depiction of ‘Orthodoxy’ in Post-Soviet Space: How Vladimir Putin Uses the Church in His Anti-Western Campaign

This article seeks to examine Russia’s recent interest in uplifting the status of Orthodox church as a pivotal factor in the state. Most importantly, the position of Orthodox Church has grown rapidly during Putin’s administration as a solacing factor to fill the gap emerging from the fall of the Soviet Union. The sixteenth-century doctrine propounded by Filofei called ‘Third Rome’, which profoundly portrayed Moscow as the last sanctuary for Eastern Christianity and the nineteenth-century nationalist mantra of ‘Orthodoxy, Nationality, and Autocracy’, is rejuvenated under Putin as the new ideological path to move away from the Western influence. Specifically, it is an evident factor that ideological movement that rigidly denies Russia’s hobnobbing with the Liberal West is rather intensified after the Crimean crisis in 2014. Under this situation, Putin’s usage of Orthodoxy and Russia’s spiritual legacy stands as a direct political tool, expressing Russia’s uniqueness of the global affairs. This article will critically examine the historical trajectory of the Orthodox Church in Russia as an indicator of its distinctiveness.

Dramatizing Chinese Intellectuals of the Republican Era in Face for Mr. Chiang Kai-shek: Encoding Nostalgia in a Comedy of Ideas

Face for Mr. Chiang Kai-shek, one of the most influential Chinese plays to have garnered attention in recent years, serves as a reminder of the importance of campus theatre in the formation and development of modern Chinese spoken drama from the early twentieth century onwards. As an old-fashioned high comedy that features witty dialogues and conveys philosophical and political ideas, it stands in opposition to such other forms of theatre in China today as the extravagant, propagandistic ‘main melody’ plays, as well as the experimental theatre of images. This article argues that the play’s focus on Chinese intellectuals of the Republican era and their ideas encodes nostalgia both in its dramatic content and theatrical form: the former encodes nostalgia for the Republican era through a nuanced representation of Chinese intellectuals of that period, while the latter encodes nostalgia for orthodox spoken drama (huaju) in the form of a comedy of ideas. Yuan Li (first author) is Professor of English in the Faculty of English Language and Culture, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. She has published extensively on contemporary Chinese and Anglo-Irish drama, theatre, and cinema. Tim Beaumont (corresponding author) is Assistant Professor at the School of Foreign Languages at Shenzhen University. His research is primarily philosophical, and it is currently focused on the relationship between nineteenth-century liberal nationalism and contemporary multiculturalism.

Clark , Roland Sectarianism and Renewal in 1920s Romania: The Limits of Orthodoxy and Nation-Building (review)

REVIEWS 581 attempts to get Maslow to New York, but he died suddenly in Havana, very likely murdered by Stalinist assassins. This is a well written and meticulously researched study about two tragic figures of the KPD. It tells the story of a couple inextricably linked by their political convictions and their shared fate, with their political careers culminating in a short period of leadership. Fischer (and Maslow) forced through the Bolshevization of the party only to find themselves amongst its first victims. One of the most intriguing parts of the story is Fischer’s political confusion after the murder of her partner. She wrote a book critical of German Communism that combined ‘the authenticity of an ex-communist […] with the same dogmatism and lack of nuance that she had displayed during her political life in the KPD’ (p. 191). She subsequently realized her mistake and reapproached Communism, and in doing so, showed herself to have been a far more complex figure than Maslow ever was. Leipzig University Udo Grashoff Clark, Roland. Sectarianism and Renewal in 1920s Romania: The Limits of Orthodoxy and Nation-Building. Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York, 2021. ix + 222 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £85.00. Over the past decade, several important books have been published on religious renewal movements in the Balkans. One of these, Aleksandra Djurić Milovanović and Radmila Radić’s collected volume, Orthodox Christian Renewal Movements in Eastern Europe (Basingstoke, 2017) includes a chapter on the Lord’s Army in Romania by Corneliu Contantineanu. Although Constantineanu gives a thorough account of the formation and influence of the Lord’s Army, he does not explain how Protestant Pietist and Stundist ideas influenced Romanian Orthodox theologians such as Iosif Trifa (the founder of the Lord’s Army), and Dumitru Cornilescu and Tudor Popescu (the founders of the Stork’s Nest), all three of whom were Orthodox clergymen who fell out of favour with the Romanian Orthodox Church. Roland Clark’s new book sets out to fill this gap and to expand upon it by devoting an entire study to Romania’s religious renewal movements. To do so, Clark takes a major detour to explore the full panoply of religious life in 1920s Romania, and also the nationalism that was rampant in the country, especially after 1918, the year of the formation of Greater Romania, following the First World War. Thus he demonstrates how the Orthodox and (to a lesser degree) Greek Catholic Churches tried to monopolize nineteenth-century nationalism and use it SEER, 99, 3, JULY 2021 582 against their smaller competitors, alleging that these various denominations were not real Romanians but foreigners who engaged in anti-Romanian propaganda. The entire process of nation-building recognized, beyond the rhetoric of ‘us against them’, ‘a collection of diverse religious communities responding to rapid social change in different ways’. These social changes, Clark argues, included ‘rising literacy rates, new religious practices, new ways of engaging with Scripture, a newly empowered laity inspired by universal male suffrage, a growing civil society that was taking control of community organizing and the sudden expansion of the Romanian nation-state’ (p. 9). Clark applies to the Stork’s Nest and the Lord’s Army James Kapalo’s concept of ‘liminal Orthodoxy’ — forms of Orthodox Christianity suspended between Orthodoxy and other religious traditions — characterizing them as reform movements where the social tensions between the majority Orthodox Church and the so-called ‘Repenter’ denominations were experienced inside the Orthodox Church itself. Popular in 1920s Romania, the term ‘Repenter’ is a derogatory label widely used initially by the Orthodox to refer to evangelical groups such as Baptists, Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and so on, that ended up being adopted by these groups themselves. Rather than be driven by methodology, Clark focuses on contemporary details, drawing on a wide range of primary sources — sermons, pamphlets, newspapers and magazines — which enable him to delineate these various denominations, to expose their mutual hostility and reveal the scope of the competition between the majority Orthodox Church and these many smaller (some of them really tiny) groups. By detailing each group’s account of itself and their misrepresentation of others Clark brings them into lively conversation with each other...

A de-monumentalizating revolt in Chile. From the whitened nation to the plurinational political community

ABSTRACT Among the most outstanding repertoires of collective action in the ‘revolt’ that took place in the spring of 2019 in Chile, were the exercises of dismantlement and the demand for indigenous presence. And this is curious because the official history of Chile has sought, in many ways, to deny ‘the Indian’ of the total story. The ‘other’ emerges only as a past fragment, while the bodies and biographies of the elite flood books and cities with their monumental presence. So, what does the dismantlement of this elite history and the vindication of the denied indigenous presence indicate to us? Are we perhaps facing a popular revolt with decolonizing overtones? What initial conclusions about the evolution of national identities can be drawn from these political and aesthetic repertoires? We believe that, after the actions of discarding, scratching or saturating the public monumentality, a deep criticism is projected towards the homogenizing narratives of the nineteenth century nation. Today, ‘whiteness’, as a cultural script of the nation, is put under tension. Finally, we believe that, along with the criticism of the continuities of a racist story of the nation, there emerges a search for the elaboration of new identitarian and cultural scripts. It emerges, imagined from that erased indigenous condition, as a variegated construction of the political community emerging from silencing of five centuries. This is where the decoloniality of the social outbreak is incubated.

Manu Samriti Chander's Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century

<scp>Manu Samriti Chander's</scp> <i>Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century</i>

The transatlantic Thames: Anglo-American tensions on the Victorian ‘stream of pleasure’

ABSTRACT While it is widely understood that rivers took on new symbolic power as avatars of nationalism in the late nineteenth century, less examined is their use as a space for Transatlantic cultural flow, and transnational commentary and critique. This article explores the ways in which a variety of Americans abroad in this period centred the Thames – newly charged with nationalist sentiment – in their accounts of Britain. In particular, it analyses Elizabeth Robins and Joseph Pennell’s travel narrative The Stream of Pleasure, first published as the lead article in the ‘Midsummer Holiday Issue’ of The Century Magazine in 1889, as an exemplary text in which both artist and writer play with the image of the river in ways that chime with much wider Transatlantic debates at this moment.

«Все это одна фантазия»: критика современности в романе Достоевского «Идиот»

The opposition between Europe and Russia runs through Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot, culminating in Mme Epanchina’s declaration that both Europe and the Russians who travel to Europe are “one big fantasy” [Dostoevsky, 2002, p. 615]. In the novel, Dostoevsky uses the exile trope as a literary tool for expressing his Russian idea. Although the spiritual underpinnings of Dostoevsky’s nationalism have been well studied, the secular side of this concept bears further exploration. Peter Wagner argues that nationalism constitutes a response to the nostalgia that is developed in exile following one’s breaking away from tradition. Nineteenth-century nationalism specifically “was an attempt to recreate a sense of origins in the face of the disembedding effects of early modernity and capitalism” [Wagner, 2001, p. 103]. By applying Wagner’s theoretical framework to Dostoevsky’s narrative, the author demonstrates that in its secular essence, Dostoevsky’s nationalism is not a merely localized manifestation of a uniquely Russian sentiment, but a symptom of a larger phenomenon that was taking place in late nineteenth-century Europe. Because Mme Epanchina gets to say the final word in Dostoevsky’s novel, her role and the subtleties of her message will be the primary focus of the present analysis.

«Все это одна фантазия»: критика современности в романе Достоевского «Идиот»

The opposition between Europe and Russia runs through Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot, culminating in Mme Epanchina’s declaration that both Europe and the Russians who travel to Europe are “one big fantasy” [Dostoevsky, 2002, p. 615]. In the novel, Dostoevsky uses the exile trope as a literary tool for expressing his Russian idea. Although the spiritual underpinnings of Dostoevsky’s nationalism have been well studied, the secular side of this concept bears further exploration. Peter Wagner argues that nationalism constitutes a response to the nostalgia that is developed in exile following one’s breaking away from tradition. Nineteenth-century nationalism specifically “was an attempt to recreate a sense of origins in the face of the disembedding effects of early modernity and capitalism” [Wagner, 2001, p. 103]. By applying Wagner’s theoretical framework to Dostoevsky’s narrative, the author demonstrates that in its secular essence, Dostoevsky’s nationalism is not a merely localized manifestation of a uniquely Russian sentiment, but a symptom of a larger phenomenon that was taking place in late nineteenth-century Europe. Because Mme Epanchina gets to say the final word in Dostoevsky’s novel, her role and the subtleties of her message will be the primary focus of the present analysis.

Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck

Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck

Contemporary reception of Eddic themes in new media: virtual 'Nordic' identities, case study: Dark Age of Camelot

This article discusses the most recent (twenty-first century) development in reception and adaptation of Nordic mythology (particularly referring to the Prose and Poetic Edda) and the appropriating of Nordic identities (stereotypes) that is taking place in the so-called new media. In the last two decades the reception of Nordic mythology or Nordic 'themes' in different new media like film, comic books, heavy metal music and computer games has exploded. New media are generally considered expressions of 'popular' culture and have therefore not yet received much scholarly attention. However, since those media are growing notably and especially computer games (console and online applications) reach an enormous audience. Scientific interest in them has increased in recent years. Miller mentions the 'sexiness of Vikings in video games, the pretense of Viking-like settings for popular television programs […]' (Miller, 2014, p. 4). The case study is Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC – Mythic Entertainment 2001) which is a MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) that is currently (2015) still available to play online. We will show examples of themes (characters, narratives, objects etc.) deriving from Eddic texts and how they are represented and deployed in the game. Since the representation of 'Nordic' identity is a key feature in the game's construction, it will therefore be addressed as well. The fictional world of DAoC consists of three realms – Albion, Hibernia and Midgard – that are at war with each other. Their (human) inhabitants are respectively based on medieval Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Norse tribes that differ distinctively in their character traits. Our goal is to elaborate on the representation of identity traits of the fictional 'Norse' races (as defined by the game) that appear in DAoC. We will scrutinize if and how the game uses older or more current concepts of (national) identity. In order to do so, an overview of Scandinavian / Nordic identity constructions that have been popular and / or widespread from antiquity will be presented, via medieval sources to romanticism and nineteenth century nationalism until current discussions of national identity.

The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot

The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot

“There is nothing human in nature”

Pascale M. Manning, “‘There is nothing human in nature’: Denying the Anthropocene in Richard Jefferies” (pp. 473–501) This essay contends that the work of the nineteenth-century British writer and naturalist Richard Jefferies embodies both a recognition and a radical denial of the Anthropocene, expressing a nascent form of the ambivalence that stalks our contemporary recognitions and misrecognitions of the human in/and nature. Drawing upon a range of Jefferies’s writings—both his essays and his autobiography in addition to his fiction—it argues that there exists in Jefferies’s work a recurring vein of anti-ecological thought, particularly evidenced in the way it frequently depicts strict boundary lines, whether between agricultural and urban spaces, between civilization and wild nature, or between the human and the natural world. Taking issue with recent ecocritical accounts of Jefferies’s post-apocalyptic novel After London (1885), this essay rereads Jefferies’s novel in light of the wider range of his writings to argue that it is most usefully read not as a proto-ecological rebuke to the unsustainability of human agro-industrial practices, nor as a prophetic evocation of a world re-greened by the collapse of those practices, but rather as the irresolute culmination of a career spent both testifying to the essential inviolability of nature and bearing witness to the mounting evidence of anthropogenic rupture.

A Bedouin Principle of Freedom for the Risorgimento d’Italia: Michele Amari Integrates Ibn Khaldūn with Vico’s filologia

Abstract In the New Science (1744), Giambattista Vico defined filologia as “the doctrine of all the institutions that depend on human choice” of the mondo civile. When nineteenth-century European nationalism was on the rise, supported by narratives of cultural homogeneity and specificity, philological comparatism was the state-of-the-art and it, often, legitimated the obsessions with the purity of origins and genealogies. Italy, characterized by internal plurality and its Mediterranean entanglements, is a model case. Whereas many discourses of the Risorgimento aspired to shape a new Italian nation after the classical model, Michele Amari’s History of the Muslims of Sicily (1854–1872) marked an astonishing exception. For him, going back to Islamic-Sicilian history, its literary, rhetorical and linguistic culture, meant to resume, on a higher level of incivilmento (Vico), what had been obscured by cultural decline: the spirit of freedom and equality, which Ibn Khaldūn had attributed to the Bedouins and their dynamics in history.

Frankenstein in the History of Happiness: From Ancient Ethics to Richard Wright

ABSTRACT In the classical and neo-classical philosophical tradition, virtue is necessary, or even sufficient, for happiness; it partially or fully constitutes happiness. Virtue comes first; happiness attends it. In Frankenstein, however, Shelley’s creature thinks of happiness as a social and material entitlement, and, turning classical philosophy on its head, a prerequisite to virtue. ‘I was benevolent and good,’ the creature says to his creator, ‘misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.’ Happiness, to the creature’s mind, is not available to the lone, superior individual as an assertion of his own rational independence; it is, rather, dependent on circumstance and our needs as fundamentally social creatures. Shelley’s moral and psychological inquiry into virtue and happiness emerges from political-philosophical responses to the French Revolution, chiefly those by her parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. The ethical question explored in Frankenstein continue to animate nineteenth-century realist and naturalist novels. Developing the case for Shelley’s direct influence on African-American literary naturalism of the first half of the twentieth century, I conclude with a consideration of Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son, which examines the genesis of and responsibility for another moral monster, Bigger Thomas.