Nation and Migration

The Making of British Atlantic Literature, 1765-1835

Juliet Shields author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc

Published:28th Jan '16

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Nation and Migration cover

Nation and Migration provides a literary history for a nation that still considers itself a land of immigrants. Most studies of transatlantic literature focus primarily on what Stephen Spender has described as the "love-hate relations" between the United States and England, the imperial center of the British Atlantic world. In contrast, this book explores the significant contributions of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales to the development of a British Atlantic literature and culture. It argues that, by allowing England to stand in for the British archipelago, recent literary scholarship has oversimplified the processes through which the new United States differentiated itself culturally from Britain and underestimated the impact of migration on British nation formation during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Scottish, Irish, and Welsh migrants brought with them to the American colonies and early republic stories and traditions very different from those shared by English settlers. Americans looked to these stories for narratives of cultural and racial origins through which to legitimate their new nation. Writers situated in Britain's Celtic peripheries in turn drew on American discourses of rights and liberties to assert the cultural independence of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales from the English imperial center. The stories that late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britons and Americans told about transatlantic migration and settlement, whether from the position of migrant or observer, reveal the tenuousness and fragility of Britain and the United States as relatively new national entities. These stories illustrate the dialectial relationship between nation and migration.

Overall, this book makes a valuable contribution to our recognition of how regionalism continued to be a force both in Britain and in North America during the early national period. ... Shield's charting of the unfolding of archipelagic British literatures "in dialectical relation to their American counterparts" (127) adds an important dimension to our understanding of the transatlantic cultural matrix at the turn of the nineteenth century. * Paul Giles, Modern Language Quarterly *
Shields's approach-eschewing "the nation-state as a primary or natural unit of analysis while nonetheless acknowledging its long-standing role in organizing literary study" (139) -- and her focus on microgeographies result in a lucid study of Romantic-era literature that tests and displaces conventional geographical and genre boundaries. Nation and Migration is a welcome contribution to a field of study that keeps revealing important literary and critical spaces. * Michael Wiley, Modern Philology *
Shields' innovative study builds on the definitive formulations and insights of New British History architect J.G.A. Pocock and the subsequent achievements of devolutionary, archipelagic criticism. But Shieldss central concern is the fields limitations. * Margaret Linley, European Romantic Review *

ISBN: 9780190272555

Dimensions: 155mm x 236mm x 18mm

Weight: 408g

208 pages