- 352 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
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Nation and Narration
About This Book
Bhabha, in his preface, writes 'Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully encounter their horizons in the mind's eye'.
From this seemingly impossibly metaphorical beginning, this volume confronts the realities of the concept of nationhood as it is lived and the profound ambivalence of language as it is written. From Gillian Beer's reading of Virginia Woolf, Rachel Bowlby's cultural history of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Francis Mulhern's study of Leaviste's 'English ethics'; to Doris Sommer's study of the 'magical realism' of Latin American fiction and Sneja Gunew's analysis of Australian writing, Nation and Narration is a celebration of the fact that English is no longer an English national consciousness, which is not nationalist, but is the only thing that will give us an international dimension.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Halftitle
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: narrating the nation
- 2 What is a nation?
- 3 Tribes within nations: the ancient Germans and the history of modern France
- 4 The national longing for form
- 5 Irresistible romance: the foundational fictions of Latin America
- 6 Denaturalizing cultural nationalisms: multicultural readings of âAustraliaâ
- 7 Postal politics and the institution of the nation
- 8 Literature â Nationalismâs other? The case for revision
- 9 Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Englishness of English art
- 10 Destiny made manifest: the styles of Whitmanâs poetry
- 11 Breakfast in America â Uncle Tomâs cultural histories
- 12 Telescopic philanthropy: professionalism and responsibility in Bleak House
- 13 European pedigrees/African contagions: nationality, narrative, and communality in Tutuola, Achebe, and Reed
- 14 English reading
- 15 The island and the aeroplane: the case of Virginia Woolf
- 16 DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modem nation
- Index