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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.
This novel is a designedly political document. Written at the time of the Hastings impeachment and set in the period of Hastings’s Orientalist government, Hartly House, Calcutta (1789) represents a dramatic delineation of the Anglo-Indian encounter. The novel constitutes a significant intervention in the contemporary debate concerning the nature of Hastings’s rule of India by demonstrating that it was characterised by an atmosphere of intellectual sympathy and racial tolerance. Within a few decades the Evangelical and Anglicising lobbies frequently condemned Brahmans as devious beneficiaries of a parasitic priestcraft, but Phebe Gibbes’s portrayal of Sophia’s Brahman and the religion he espouses represent a perception of India dignified by a sympathetic and tolerant attempt to dispel prejudice.
to save money due to austerity. Yet the particular dynamics of these changes can only be explained through longer histories of welfare and immigration, relations of race and class, and post-imperial British nationhood. It is these histories that position different groups as closer to the core or closer to the periphery of Britishness, thereby gradating how valuable and worthy of national resources they are. These boundaries are not only made more visible when resources become scarcer, like objects revealed by a receding tide – but the conflict over them intensifies
by the continuing imbrication of England’s most pressing national and religious concerns with French ones. 2 It is also, paradoxically, an engagement that testifies, from the broad historical perspective, to a process of disengagement. English and French nationhood, for the first time since the Norman Conquest, are each now struggling towards self-definition, independently of the other (that is, the
apposite note on which to end the narrative. 14 Genre, nationhood and belonging In Kingston’s rendition of the gamut of Chinese American men’s experiences on Gold Mountain, literature, history, biography, cartography and law all figure as discourses producing ideas of nationhood. As I have explored, and Kingston has asserted, the text itself is at times literature, at others biography, memoir or history, or a mixture of several modes. Kingston’s traversal of discursive boundaries is a strategy that effectively reveals
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
some traditional and contemporary emphases in its interpretation. It would stress, for example, its interest in conflicting processes of remembrance rather than assuming that it presents a uniform vision of the past associated with the ‘history play’. Henry V may well extol the potential of English or ‘British’ nationhood especially as it is inspired by charismatic
. I will focus on a limited selection of written sources – particularly popular histories and retellings of the Vinland voyages, but also more creative treatments of the subject matter in poetry and addresses – from the late nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century, when new ideas on Icelandic nationhood emerged in the spirit of the island’s independence movement. Icelandic interpretations of Vinland will be analysed in the first part, but the main focus of this essay lies in the significance Vinland acquired to Icelandic immigrants in Canada. I
interesting since it was written in the heart of Elizabeth’s Protestant court at a time when Catholics were (or were presented as) menacing to both England’s state religion and its nationhood. Few non-Catholic English people late in the century would have recognized Our Lady of Walsingham and her shrine, except in memory, as one of the hundreds of ruins scattered across the English landscape caused by the devastation of the Dissolution of the monasteries in 1538. Yet Walsingham had once been home to a shrine that drew many thousands of pilgrims; it had been centred on what