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Daniel Pick's authoritative study of theories of degeneration and their historical contexts, Faces of Degeneration charts the development of such theories from the 1840s to the end of the First World War. David Punter has noted how Gothic narratives such as Dracula and Jekyll and Hyde indicate the presence of an anxiety about colonial decline. The analysis of Dracula and Jekyll and Hyde addresses the permeability that existed between fictional, and supposedly 'scientific' notions of the unstable, often hybrid, male subject. The chapter explores how the following British commentators responded to some of the ideas about masculinity and nation: Samuel Smiles, Charles Kingsley, Edwin Lankester and Otto Weininger. Siobhan B. Somerville argues that in sexology racial identifications were mapped on to sexual orientation. This was done so that the 'blackness' or 'whiteness' of a subject was correlated to the levels masculinity or femininity exhibited by the subject.
The close relation between concepts of nation and landscapes is well-established in cultural and literary studies. This book considers how the geological substance of national territory itself is used to support ideas of nationhood. The focus of much of the book is on Cornwall (the region located at the far south-west of Britain) and 'primitive' rocks found in this region as an in-depth case study in the context of 'Celtic' Britain. The book begins by focusing primarily on an emerging consciousness of Cornwall as a distinctively rocky territory as depicted in nineteenth-century geological journals, poetry, folklore, travel narratives, gothic and detective fiction. It then looks mainly at twentieth-century ghost stories, Cornish nationalist and New Age writing, and modernist and romance novels. The book reflects how the categories of science and literature were only beginning to take shape in the nineteenth century. It does so by building on well-established connections between these fields to show how geology and poetry together engage with rocks as a basis for perceiving Celtic nations and native races as distinct from England. Finally, the book takes on a more distinctly fictional engagement with the Cornish nationalist imagination and its ghosts.
of these publications in 1706 is important for what follows, because at the inception of the century there is a clear and unambiguous alignment of a fraught political nationhood with a fraught visionary practice. The supernatural realm is not bolted on after the fact of political reality, it is constitutive of it, certainly in terms of the Union debate at the turn of the century. Literary practice, figurative practice, is not something that follows a high-political moment, but is rather the thing that constitutes the architecture and boundaries of the debates
, Imagination and Nationhood ( London : Palgrave Macmillan , 2017 ).
, for example, that, although the nation’s first heart transplant was full of ambivalence for the donor kin, media coverage elided that complexity. 56 Cinema of the 1990s also uses transplantation plots to celebrate Indian nationhood and communities, and particularly to valorise ‘the familial order of giving eroded by selfish Western modernity’. 57 Padmanabhan’s play contrasts with both these discourses. Padmanabhan’s play engages gender in ways that both echo and deviate from the gendering at play in the turn-of-the-millennium Indian markets on which it
relation between concepts of nation and landscapes is well-established in cultural and literary studies; 1 this book considers how the geological substance of national territory itself is used to support ideas of nationhood. As a case study, it examines the gradual formation of a cultural consciousness of Cornwall as a nation (the region located at the far south-west of Britain), a
, arguing that a print culture in which multiple imports and reprints circulated alongside one another led to the British perception of American literature as radically material. I then examine reprints of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pilot and Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly in the early numbers of Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley’s influential ‘Standard Novels’ series (1831–55), whose illustrations and prefaces amplify connections between transatlantic circulation and the American nationhood articulated
accidental. The romance directly addressing Irish nationhood ends tragically, because, for Maturin, happy nationhood is finally unimaginable. The Wild Irish Boy is the comic romance, and was the first to be published (in 1808). Both texts are allegories in that the marriage plots feature the coming together of the Irish and English in a mutual process of national self-definition. Another dominant feature of
as emblematised by an ostensibly motherless, patriarchally obsessed protagonist subjected to bizarre psycho-sexual experimentation (174), Frank’s unofficial existence as a ‘boy’ without a birth certificate (13–14) nicely parallels a Scotland devoid of nationhood status post-Union (1707). His reiterated self-description as a guilt-ridden, fragmented individual possessing a ‘racist’ (63), ‘sick’ (78), and ‘destructive’ (80) dark side is employed – in an unsettling Jekyll-and-Hyde manner – to mirror the post-Union stereotype of Scotland as a schizophrenic nation
similar anxiety concerning legitimacy. Both also embody dreams of nationhood and Irish aspirations; both contain Catholic elements and stereotypes. Miles’s point is that, in both cases, ‘Maturin’s plot at once confronts these stereotypes, and succumbs to them; but the energy that propels it is not anti-Catholicism per se, but Irish nationalism’ (p. 100). Thus the Catholic as abject European other in