Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire.

Burgess, Miranda J.

Katie Trumpener. Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Pp. 426. $55.00 cloth/$19.95 paper.

Katie Trumpener's Preface sums up the ambitious goals of Bardic Nationalism: "to redraw ... the origins of cultural nationalism, the lineages of the novel, and the early history of the English-speaking world" "argu[ing] ... implicitly for the disciplinary transformation of English literature ... and for a new way of conceiving the disciplinary mandate of comparative literature" (xi). Bardic Nationalism is, therefore, a book that uses its unique brand of historiography to reconceive two disciplines of literary study and to enact the changes it recommends.

The scope of this project, and the archivally and generically rich material that supports it, make the Preface even more indispensable than the typical introductory overview. First, it cuts across the chronological organization of Trumpener's readings, cross-referencing the unifying concerns that thread through, and are transformed within, each chapter. Second, in proposing a new comparatism--neither traditionally linguistic nor literary, but generic and national and genealogical--Bardic Nationalism brings together unexpected materials in unusual configurations. In Part One, works by Edgeworth, Galt, Owenson, Smollett, Scott, and many other novelists weave among annalistic histories, travels, and agricultural surveys. In Part Two, mid-nineteenth-century Canadian colonial narratives, such as John Richardson's Wacousta and Susanna Moodie's Roughing it in the Bush, join the "lineages" of "English literature." The Preface's schematic map helps familiarize Trumpener's "implicit"--or enacted--project of making English studies comparative and comparatism postcolonial, especially for readers (most?) whose expertise falls short of the book's generic, historical, or geographical span.

Although the three objects of enquiry specified in the Preface unfold sequentially from the introduction into Parts One and Two, Bardic Nationalism also illustrates their organic entanglement. The "origins of cultural nationalism" coincide with, and participate in, the evolution of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century novels within Britain and, more surprisingly, in Britain's expanding empire and the novels that aid and chronicle its expansion. In her introductory chapter, Trumpener argues that the roots of the entanglement lie in the importance eighteenth-century nationalists from Britain's peripheries, from Ossianic antiquaries to United Irish rebels, granted the figure of "the bard." Uniting oral tradition with national historiography, poetic vivacity with a love for material and textual artifacts, the bard symbolizes literary and organic notions of national identity, nostalgic memory as well as the continuing hope of cultural survival. But he simultaneously serves Enlightened English literati facing economic progress and declining patronage as a model of poetic entrepreneurism, an alternative to the defensive antiquarianism with which nationalists criticized Britain's advancing "internal colonialism" and economic changes. These competing but symmetrical claims make the bardic figure a bond, as well as a field of contest, between peripheral nationalists and British Enlightenment thinkers and colonial administrators. Thus they ground Trumpener's argument that nationalist ideology and its bardic fictions, with their "emphasis on solidarity," did not simply reject, but responded dynamically to the Enlightened individualist and entrepreneurial political and cultural stances that marked the growth of capitalist economic conditions (23). Her point, an important corrective to Benedict Anderson's Marxian analysis of nationalism, is that peripheral cultural nationalisms developed in dialectical relation, not reaction, to Britain's and its empire's progress.

The nuanced dialectic that characterizes Trumpener's treatment of "bardic nationalism" is characteristic of her literary historiography throughout the book. Writing about cultural metaphors like the bard, about archaeological fragments excavated from Irish bogs, or about narrative genres or texts, she highlights the ideological capaciousness that allows each object to be read and recirculated from diverse competing perspectives. In each case, the object of dispute provides common ground between the various writers that employ it, even as contrasting relations to it distinguish one group from another. The result is an argument that acknowledges the contingent fictionality of nationalist mythmaking and, at the same time, highlights its very real power.

Like their Enlightened counterparts, Trumpener argues, cultural nationalist narratives build on classically Enlightenment genres that recommend progress and administrative efficiency, and that represent history as a uniform series of stages capable of uneven geographical development and so of remediation from the metropolitan center. The politics of nationalist writers intersects these genres from diverse angles, which change with the historical contexts governing the production and reception of each narrative. Thus cultural nationalist narratives may variously--even successively--appear Enlightenment-progressive, nostalgic, straightforwardly reactionary, or dedicated to an "accretive" progress that conserves the fragments of the past while constructing the future from them. It is the hybrid quality of these works that allows them to turn from nationalist defense to imperialist offense, that makes the lineage of cultural nationalism and its fictions paradoxically instrumental in imperial expansion. Exported to the colonies, that is, the tropes, characters, and assumptions of peripheral fictions, once instrumental in defining Scottishness or Irishness against Englishness, become the foundations of a "British" identity abroad--and of the "English" Canadian identity that develops from it.

Part One of Bardic Nationalism argues that the crucial English Enlightenment genres for peripheral nationalisms, and thus for colonial progress, are the land survey and travel narrative. In Chapter 2, Samuel Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland--its Enlightenment historical assumption that travel across space permits glimpses into the past, and its role in the debates over Macpherson's Ossian--gives rise to both nationalist rebuttal and nationalist imitation. In novels by Smollett, Thomas Amory, Owenson, and Scott, Trumpener demonstrates, Johnson's belief in peripheral preservation of the unchanged past and his skepticism about oral tradition, along with Macpherson's elegy for a dead but culturally remembered heroic national history, meet and clash without stable resolution. Chapter 1 tells a similar story about the survey as practiced by such writers as Arthur Young. Surveyors look at the land and see in its apparent material chaos--its riot of stuff--a political intractability that also offers potential for economic development. Nationalist writers respond by reading the details Young glosses over in the landscape and reclaiming the stories they insist these objects tell. The historical strata that lie buried in bogs, for example, offer a tale of past losses and a lesson in cultural survival whose ends depend on the ways the artifacts are preserved, discussed, and employed. Trumpener argues that Edgeworth's writing in particular moves between all these perspectives, illustrating that cultural nationalist novelists revisited and reworked their models in other genres--even in their own earlier works--as they negotiated the persistent but changing tensions between the national past and future.

This argument extends beyond Edgeworth in Chapter 3, which expands Trumpener's much-cited "National Character, Nationalist Plots."(1) Trumpener shows how the varieties of nationalist and historical fiction develop along parallel lines, but at different rates and with different ends, in response to changing cultural and political conditions and mutating generic inheritances. More importantly, she outlines the losses accruing to a literary history that allows itself to forget these conditions and the diversity of this national, generic, and ideological heritage. As literary historiography progresses, Trumpener argues, internally troubled writings such as Edgeworth's or Gait's, which enact conflicts between historical agents or responses to historical change, fade out against the increasingly canonical backdrop of novels, such as Scott's, whose "motor of history" appears "strangely impersonal," and its ends inevitable (156). This character of Scott is qualified by other recent writers, such as Yoon Sun Lee and Stephen Arata, who emphasize Scott's open indebtedness to material culture and the imaginative, even theatrical processes that give it national life.(2) Yet these writers, too, advance Trumpener's disestablishment of Lukacs's necessitarian Scott--by the slightly different means of reading Scott against himself to recall what his canonizers forgot.

Part Two reveals the high stakes in Trumpener's account of forgetting in historiography. In a series of reflections on relations between home and empire, in which remembering plays an important part, Trumpener takes steps to reverse the decay of literary historical memory. For historical fictions, exported to the colonies, provide conduits for a new colonialist, subsequently national, ideology. Even in Chapter 4, where the works discussed remain firmly British in origin, Trumpener shows that Austen's and other "domestic" novels are integrally interested in imperial processes, and that they unhesitatingly acknowledge the dependency of the British domus on colonial migration and production. Such works bear what Trumpener argues is the forgotten influence of nationalist narratives, whose characteristic tensions between past and future, cosmopolitan progress and national preservation, they rewrite by weighing relations between competing centers of consciousness, at home (in England) and away (in the colonies that support the domestic economy). These tensions become intimately literal in the archival works of children's literature discussed in Chapter 5 and the debates on nursing and fostering practices and cultural inculcation--especially across nations and ethnicities--in the diaries, letters, travel narratives, and novels that contextualize Trumpener's analysis. If colonial export allows these works to educate colonists in their new imperial identities, that is, it does not efface the seeds of anxiety, dissent, and colonial critique, the traces of generic and national hybridity, that lie latent within the exported narratives.

Trumpener turns wholly to narrative export in the concluding chapter, which concerns the attempts of colonists to establish (or, in generically dialectical response, to disestablish) the British "home" being superimposed on the Canadian landscape. The process--mingling self-differentiation from the United States with conflicted responses to Britain and its administrative acts--is aided by the consumption and reframing of exported works of nationalist fiction by the emerging colonial print trade. Trumpener gives practical substance to the workings of anxiety and memory in the canonization process by tracing the publication history of Bogle Corbet (1831)--written in Canada, published on John Galt's return to Britain, and reprinted in Canada only in a 1977 abridgement that homogenizes its irreconcilable politics of nationalism, anti-Americanism, and intense imperial loyalty.

Here readers of Studies in Romanticism will likely find themselves on unfamiliar ground: Galt is one of the few writers in this chapter that I, for example--from Vancouver (Trumpener's colonial Abbotsford, named for Scott's, is a suburb) in a department known for its expertise in Canadian literatures--have read. As in earlier chapters where less-familiar material is discussed, Trumpener's summaries are rigorous, and their clarity goes a long way to convince readers, however new to her sources, of the rightness of her account. Romanticist readers who find themselves daunted by serious, lengthy readings of a literature they do not ordinarily study might consider that Chapter 6 not only enacts Trumpener's promised remapping of "English literature," but also enacts her new comparative method. Moreover, it opens considerable space for more traditionally comparatist scholars to insert the writing of French-speaking Canada into its colonial literary equation, one possible way of taking up Trumpener's concluding call for "new ways of describing the formation of colonial consciousness" (291). Others might include considering the role of readers and consumers alongside writers and publishers in producing colonial and postcolonial cultures, and in forging resistance to them. Such studies now have an indispensable historiographical foundation laid for them. They will need to engage very seriously with Trumpener's powerful analysis--at once rigorously formal and rigorously historical--as they build on her foundations.

(1.) Katie Trumpener, "National Character, Nationalist Plots: National Tale and Historical Novel in the Age of Waverley, 1806-1830" ELH 60 (1993): 685-731.

(2.) Yoon Sun Lee, "A Divided Inheritance: Scott's Antiquarian Novel and the British Nation," ELH 64 (1997): 537-67; Stephen Arata, "Scott and Pageantry: The Example of Kenilworth," elsewhere in these pages.

MIRANDA J. BURGESS is Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740-1830 (Cambridge UP, 2000) and of essays on eighteenth-century and romantic fiction.