This chapter considers how English dictionaries made sense of sexuality beyond modern English society. It begins with the early modern assumption that a nation’s character was commensurate with its language, and that the moderate nature of England’s language and culture entailed that any ‘excess’ found in either must be the result of foreign influence. The chapter examines how sodomy and buggery, along with the semantic field of pederasty, were positioned by etymological, general, and hard-word dictionaries as ethically and ethnically remote, vices practised in the Mediterranean by ancient heathens or modern heretics. These xenophobic associations remained in dictionaries into the nineteenth century. Conversely, lexicographers’ retellings of classical myths of same-sex love—male and female—reveal sites of tension between the moderns’ veneration of Greek and Roman literature and their rejection of its pagan sensuality. The life of Sappho in particular provoked sharp disagreements over what her moral character had been, and what could or should be said about it, in a range of dictionary genres: hard-word, general, classical, and biographical.

Gupta’s conviction indicates that Indian nationhood had earlier beginnings than has generally been supposed. The “Mutiny-Rebellion” of 1857, long regarded as a key transformative event, being hailed as the “first war of Indian independence” having “national” elements, was situated within a longer genealogy. This underscored the evolutionary process through which Indian nationhood developed. It also highlighted the multivalence of the revolt. It at once symbolized “power,” Indian agency, and collective identity: cutting across caste, class, and communal divisions. By connecting the revolt with the imperial glory of Mughal Delhi, Gupta mediated the many meanings of 1857, and linked it with a long patriotic past that evoked the idea of India despite endless fragmentation. His remarks hold the key to understanding how the many stories of Indian nationhood converged at complex levels.

Did the ancients have the concept of nationhood? To raise that question is to enter a minefield. The issue of what counts as a nation has generated a flood of articles and monographs, mostly by anthropologists and sociologists, with a smattering by historians.

The very idea of a nation or nationhood has been preeminently associated with modern history. Its relevance for antiquity is not obvious and has prompted much debate. Those who see it as an exclusively modern phenomenon tend to associate it with the creation of new polities in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century as nation-states. Others, however, and they have been growing in number, argue that the existence of a unifying consciousness of affinity, kinship, and shared history goes back to antiquity and amounts to nationhood or whatever one wishes to call it.

Ever since the era of Romanticism, it has been a commonplace to link language and literature to ideas of nationhood. The ideal “nation” is understood to be one that unites all people speaking the same language within a common territory, effectively constituting a nation-state. This principle undergirds most nineteenth- and twentieth-century processes of nation formation in Europe. In some cases, this has led to the breakup of larger territorial units organized along earlier and different principles into smaller units. In other cases, it has led to the unification of territories previously divided. Notwithstanding the principle cited, many of the countries thus constituted have within their borders linguistic minorities. Some European countries have no language of their own, using one or more languages that are claimed, and usually also perceived, as the “national” language of other, bigger countries. In all instances, literature, as the most visible and enduring embodiment of a people’s language, serves as a binding element.

Abstract: The material for this chapter is drawn in part from a class I taught on American pragmatism at a local correctional institution. It raises the question: Since a habit is something we take for granted, how could we even begin to recognize our own habits as supporting tyrannical relationships? A response to this question and to the role that formal education could play in promoting this recognition is the topic for the remaining chapters in the book.

Liberal democracy arguably requires a sense of equal membership in a shared society, and in today’s world, this “shared society” is inextricably linked with ideas of nationhood. Defenders of majoritarian nationalism worry that this sense of membership in a shared national society is being eroded by multiculturalism, and argue that we must instead reaffirm the centrality of shared national identities, perhaps through “majority rights.” In this chapter, I argue that while the idea of a shared society is indeed important for liberal democracy, and that it will inevitably reflect ideas of nationhood, this is in fact an argument for strengthening, not weakening, multiculturalism and minority rights. The fact that membership claims are filtered through the lens of nationhood creates a series of formidable “membership penalties” for minorities. A robust commitment to multiculturalism and minority rights can be seen, not as a threat to the ideal of equal membership in a shared society, but as a remedy for membership penalties, and as a way of building a more inclusive ethics of membership.

This chapter tackles how the concept of British nationhood was mediated by small, portable material goods in the century that followed the 1707 Acts of Union. While existing narratives of nation-making have focused on the political, religious, and military forging of Britishness, this chapter instead considers how Britain’s intersecting industrial and commercial transformations offered opportunities for manufacturers and retailers to commoditize nationhood through material culture. This chapter restores the materiality of nationhood to historical narratives of patriotism to show that the commercialization of Britishness, through small things, provided a means of manufacturing and molding an affective form of British identity. This chapter focuses specifically on how the figurehead of Britannia signalled a material patriotism that could be worn, carried, and displayed at moments of national importance. Her image, as warrior queen, mother of the nation, and colonial pioneer, was replicated on fans, jewelry, and other decorative objects to formulate miniature material articulations of a national rhetoric. These small items held chronometric and affective significance for their owners and were complex signals of both transient and more enduring feelings of patriotism.

While most adaptation studies are organized around literary works, this book takes as its starting point British film production during World War Two. It situates four cinematic appropriations and one adaptation of Shakespeare—Leslie Howard’s Pimpernel Smith, Humphrey Jennings’s Fires Were Started, Leslie Arliss’s The Man in Grey, Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, and Laurence Olivier’s Henry V—within wartime culture. The Introduction describes the book’s method, which is to develop a synchronic film history centered upon the “wartime Shakespeare topos” (or WST), a flexible cultural trope that links Shakespeare to national identity. While the WST was deployed to articulate what binds the British people together, it was also often used in period film to register social and cultural differences within the nation. In this regard, British cinema gives us a Shakespeare who simultaneously undergirds national identity and traces the fault lines within it.

National identity represents one of the most central and defining group identities in the modern world with important implications in everyday life. In the current chapter, we review the extant literature from political psychology on nationhood by considering two key dimensions of national identity: (a) identification and attachment; and (b) its content. First, we explore the vast literature on national identification, and consider two forms of national attachment (patriotism and nationalism) alongside its societal implications. Within this focus, we consider national identification and disidentification and its consequences among majority, minority, and immigrant groups. We then review the political psychology literature on the content and meaning of nationhood by distinguishing between ethnic and civic national character, consider its societal implications, and consider research on implicit and explicit psychological representations of nationhood. We conclude by highlighting some key directions for future research on national identity within political psychology.

The opening part of this book pursues aspects of form and function. Chapter 1 describes a vision of nationhood, as distinct from a nationalist manifesto, that can be found in the Tour, with an examination of some devices employed to create the desired image of Britain, along with certain factors that made this task more difficult. Defoe’s intentions are explored along various channels: among them, those of form, rhetorical devices, political and social ideology, historiographic legacy, sources, geographic and topographic content, treatment of the communications network, and folklore. A detailed review is made of the section on London, showing how intimately the author surveys the topography of the city, down to some small nooks and crannies. A cross-sectional analysis is made of a segment in Letter 2, to illustrate the range of concerns and variety of approaches found in the text. This segment also serves as a lead-in to the remainder of the book, since it touches on several topics that later chapters consider in more detail.