France, Germany, America

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521790079.010

8 - France, Germany, America

from Part II - Geographies: The Scenes of Literary Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2009

David Simpson

Edited by

James Chandler

Book contents

Get access

Summary

Describing the nation

Self-consciousness about being English can be traced very early in the national literature, although it is often hard to be sure whether the reference is to a political, racial, social or linguistic category, or to some unspoken measure of each. Chaucer’s Anglo-Norman literary language is very different from that of his equally English (and some say more English) contemporaries in the midlands and the north. Richard Helgerson has proposed that by the sixteenth century we can see in place a coherent national consciousness and a sense of occupying the heart of an empire among writers and intellectuals seeking to consolidate their interests within a professional and vocational elite. But the point at which such circumstances can be called a fully developed nationalism has been a topic of some debate among historians and political scientists. Benedict Anderson’s influential book restricts the term to nineteenth-century liberation or unification movements motivated primarily by an emergent bourgeoisie with the resources of print capitalism at their disposal, while Hans Kohn sees the origins of modern nationalism in the English seventeenth century, when Puritan England ‘regarded itself as the new Israel’. During the early eighteenth century, as Gerald Newman and Howard Weinbrot have shown in some detail, several varieties of self-ascribed Englishness came into prominence: the new Rome, the Protestant bastion, the abiding enemy of all things French.

Keywords

English literature British readers British literary circles America Romantic period Germany France

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature , pp. 204 - 223

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521790079.010 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn, London and New York: Verso, 1991.

Bainbridge, Simon, Napoleon and English Romanticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, The Works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, with a Memoir by Lucy Aikin, 2 vols., Boston: David Reed, 1826.

Behn, Aphra, The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Todd, Janet, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996.

Blackall, Eric A., The Emergence of German as a Literary Language, 1770–1775, 2nd edn, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978.

Blair, Hugh, Sermons, London: T. Allman, 1832.

Britton, John, Sheridan and Kotzebue, London, 1799.

Bulwer, Edward Lytton, England and the English, ed. Meacham, Stanley, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. O’Brien, Conor Cruise, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.

Butler, Marilyn, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background, 1760–1830, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Cafarelli, Annette, ‘Rousseau and British Romanticism: Women and the Legacy of Male Radicalism’, in Cultural Interactions in the Romantic Age: Critical Essays in Romantic Literature, ed. Maertz, Gregory, Albany: SUNY Press, 1998.

Carlson, Julie A., In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Carlyle, Thomas, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 5 vols., London: Chapman and Hall, 1905.

Chandler, James K., England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Chandler, James K., Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992.

Craciun, Adriana, and Lokke, Kari (eds.), Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001.

Crawford, Robert, Devolving English Literature, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.

Dart, Gregory, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

De Quincey, Thomas, The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, 14 vols., ed. Masson, David, Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1890.

De Staël, Germaine, Germany, 3 vols., London: John Murray, 1813.

Deane, Seamus, The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England, 1789–1832, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Duffy, Edward, Rousseau in England: The Context for Shelley’s Critique of the Enlightenment, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1979.

Durey, Michael, Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American Republic, Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1997.

Gamer, Michael, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Gibbon, Edward, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 7 vols., London: Bell and Daldy, 1872.

Hazlitt, William, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, 21 vols., ed. Howe, P. P., New York: AMS Press, 1967.

Helgerson, Richard, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Hill, Christopher, ‘The Norman Yoke’, in Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in the Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, London: Secker and Warburg, 1958.

Hobsbawm, E. J., Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Imlay, Gilbert, The Emigrants, ed. Hare, Robert R., Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1964.

Kelly, Gary, Women, Writing and Revolution, 1790–1827, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

Kohn, Hans, Nationalism, Its Meaning and History, rev. edn, New York: Van Nostrand, 1971.

Lease, Benjamin, Anglo-American Encounters: England and the Rise of American Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

McDonald, Joan, Rousseau and the French Revolution, 1762–1791, London: Athlone Press, 1965.

Mitchell, W. J. T., ‘Influence, Autobiography and Literary History: Rousseau’s Confessions and Wordsworth’s The Prelude’, ELH 57 (1990).Google Scholar

Moore, Thomas, The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore, ed. Godley, A. D., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1915.

Murphy, Arthur (trans.), Tacitus: Historical Works, 2 vols., London and New York: Dent and Dutton, 1907.

Newman, Gerald, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987.

Preston, William, ‘Reflections on the Peculiarity of Style and Manner in the Late German Writers whose Works have appeared in English, and on the Tendency of their Productions’, Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. VIII, Dublin, 1802.

Price, Richard, Political Writings, ed. Thomas, D. O., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Reid, William Hamilton, The Rise and Dissolution of Infidel Societies in this Metropolis, London: J. Hatchard, 1800.

Roddier, Henri, J.-J. Rousseau en Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle, Paris, 1947.

Ruland, Richard (ed.), The Native Muse: Theories of American Literature, Vol. I, New York: Dutton, 1976.

Segeberg, Hanno, ‘Germany’, in Nationalism in the Age of the French Revolution, ed. Dann, Otto and Dinwiddy, John, London and Ronceverte: Hambledon Press, 1988.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, The Esdaile Notebook, ed. Cameron, Kenneth Neil, London: Faber and Faber, 1964.

Simpson, David, The Politics of American English, 1776–1850, Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Simpson, David, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt Against Theory, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Stokoe, F. W., German Influence in the English Romantic Period, 1788–1818. With Special Reference to Scott, Coleridge, Shelley and Byron (1926), New York: Russell and Russell, 1963.

Surel, Jeannine, ‘John Bull’, in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, vol. III, ed. Samuel, Raphael, London and New York: Routledge, 1989.

Thelwall, John, The Politics of English Jacobinism: The Writings of John Thelwall, ed. Claeys, Gregory, University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1995.

Trumpener, Katie, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Voisine, Jacques, J.-J. en Angleterre à l’époque romantique: les écrits autobiographiques et la légende, Paris, 1956.

Warton, Thomas, The History of English Poetry, ed. Price, Richard, 3 vols., London: Thomas Tegg, 1840.

Watson, Nicola J., Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790–1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.

Weinbrot, Howard D., Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Wellek, René, Immanuel Kant in England, 1793–1838, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1931.

Wordsworth, William, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols., ed. Owen, W. J. B. and Worthington Smyser, Jane, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974.

Young, Arthur, The Example of France, a Warning to Britain, Dublin, 1793.

Book contents

8 - France, Germany, America

Summary

Keywords

Access options

References

Save book to Kindle

Save book to Dropbox

Save book to Google Drive