Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

From W. B. Yeats's lament for “Romantic Ireland” in “September 1913” to Hugh Trevor-Roper's screed against what he saw as Walter Scott's “romantic Celtic fantasies” in The Invention of Tradition , the association between nationalism and British Romanticism is of long and broad standing in the literature on both ( Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983 : 30). While it has often been the subject of dismissiveness (whether unthinking or programmatic) or untheorized biographical speculation, the connection is as much the outcome of historical confluence and intellectual influence as it is the creation of a retrospective rhetorical linkage. Yet the reflexive linkage of Romanticism and nationalism is an imperfect shield against the underlying challenges of definition and analysis that dog each area of inquiry, most insistently at the points where the two areas converge. In his field-defining 1983 study of the literary and political history of nationalism, Imagined Communities , Benedict Anderson highlighted what he called the “philosophical poverty and even incoherence” of the phenomenon he was discussing (1983/1991: 5). The same year saw the publication of Jerome McGann's The Romantic Ideology , which called for a “new, critical view of Romanticism and its literary products” by urging its readers to historicize writings too long regarded as above the fray of the material world (1983: 1). While ... log in or subscribe to read full text