Nationalism and Desire in Early Historical Fiction analyses a sequence of early-nineteenth-century British and American texts from a perspective informed by Rene Girard's theory of triangular of 'mimetic' desire. Jane Porter's The Scottish Chiefs , Sydney Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl , Sir Walter Scott's Waverley , Old Mortality , Rob Roy , The Pirate and Redgauntlet , and Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans and Lionel Lincoln are given detailed new readings. General conclusions about the relationship of desire and nationalism in historical fiction are proposed.

"A young Englishman travels in a half-known and neglected country, which he has always been taught to look down on. Here, however, he discovers a fullness and authenticity that shows him his own emptiness and artificiality. He falls in love with a woman who seems to embody this romantic land. After complications they marry, and he is a new man." "When such a 'National Tale' is told from the perspective of the Englishman, but written by a native of Ireland, Scotland or the new United States, the operation of what Rene Girard has called triangular or imitative desire can clearly be discerned. If the foreigner desires the woman through her nation, or vice-versa, the homeland is made desirable to its own inhabitants through the imagined desires of this representative of the national 'Other', the powerful and inevitable model for nationhood itself, namely England." "Ian Dennis reassesses a sequence of early-nineteenth-century fictions by Jane Porter, Sydney Owenson, Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper in which a portrayal of the desiring 'Other' is used to generate aspirations for national identity, but also, in the greatest works of Scott, to acknowledge and critique such processes. Nationalism in historical fiction is analysed in relation to Girardian theory of desire for the first time here, offering fresh insights into one of the most popular and influential literary genres."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

American historians of the early national period, argues Eileen Ka-May Cheng, grappled with objectivity, professionalism, and other “modern” issues to a greater degree than their successors in later generations acknowledge. Her extensive readings of antebellum historians show that by the 1820s, a small but influential group of practitioners had begun to develop many of the doctrines and concerns that undergird contemporary historical practice. The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth challenges the entrenched notion that America’s first generations of historians were romantics or propagandists for a struggling young nation. Cheng engages with the works of well-known early national historians like George Bancroft, William Prescott, and David Ramsay; such lesser-known figures as Jared Sparks and Lorenzo Sabine; and leading political and intellectual elites of the day, including Francis Bowen and Charles Francis Adams. She shows that their work, which focused on the American Revolution, was often nuanced and surprisingly sympathetic in its treatment of American Indians and loyalists. She also demonstrates how the rise of the novel contributed to the emergence of history as an autonomous discipline, arguing that paradoxically “early national historians at once described truth in opposition to the novel and were influenced by the novel in their understanding of truth.” Modern historians should recognize that the discipline of history is itself a product of history, says Cheng. By taking seriously a group of too-often-dismissed historians, she challenges contemporary historians to examine some ahistorical aspects of the way they understand their own discipline.

In the early nineteenth century, London publishers dominated the transatlantic book trade. No one felt this more keenly than authors from Ireland, Scotland, and the United States who struggled to establish their own national literary traditions while publishing in the English metropolis. Authors such as Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, Walter Scott, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper devised a range of strategies to transcend the national rivalries of the literary field. By writing prefaces and footnotes addressed to a foreign audience, revising texts specifically for London markets, and celebrating national particularity, provincial authors appealed to English readers with idealistic stories of cross-cultural communion. From within the messy and uneven marketplace for books, Joseph Rezek argues, provincial authors sought to exalt and purify literary exchange. In so doing, they helped shape the Romantic-era belief that literature inhabits an autonomous sphere in society. London and the Making of Provincial Literature tells an ambitious story about the mutual entanglement of the history of books and the history of aesthetics in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Situated between local literary scenes and a distant cultural capital, enterprising provincial authors and publishers worked to maximize success in London and to burnish their reputations and build their industry at home. Examining the production of books and the circulation of material texts between London and the provincial centers of Dublin, Edinburgh, and Philadelphia, Rezek claims that the publishing vortex of London inspired a dynamic array of economic and aesthetic practices that shaped an era in literary history.

Employing gender as a unifying critical focus, Caroline Jackson-Houlston draws on the full range of Walter Scott’s novels to propose new links between Scott and Romantic-era authors such as Sophia Lee, Jane Porter, Jane Austen, Sydney Owenson, Elizabeth Hands, Thomas Love Peacock, and Robert Bage. In Scott, Jackson-Houlston suggests, sex and violence are united in a central feature of the genre of romance, the trope of raptus—the actual or threatened kidnapping of a woman and her subjection to physical or psychic violence. Though largely favouring the Romantic-period drive towards delicacy of subject-matter and expression, Scott also exhibited a residual sympathy for frankness and openness resisted by his publishers, especially towards the end of his career, when he increasingly used the freedoms inherent in romance as a mode of narrative to explore and critique gender assumptions. Thus, while Scott’s novels inherit a tradition of chivalric protectiveness towards women, they both exploit and challenge the assumption that a woman is always essentially definable as a potential sexual victim. Moreover, he consistently condemns the aggressive male violence characteristic of older models of the hero, in favour of restraint and domesticity that are not exclusively feminine, but compatible with the Scottish Enlightenment assumptions of his upbringing. A high proportion of Scott’s female characters are consistently more rational than their male counterparts, illustrating how he plays conflicting concepts of sexual difference off against one another. Jackson-Houlston illuminates Scott’s ambivalent reliance on the attractions of sex and violence, demonstrating how they enable the interrogation of gender convention throughout his fiction.

Romantic Cosmopolitanism shows how cosmopolitanism in the early nineteenth century offers a non-unified formulation of the nation that stands in contrast to more unified models such as Edmund Burke's which found nationality in, among other things, language, history, blood and geography.

A deconstruction of the national biography and mythology of William Wallace. Freed from the historian's bedrock of empiricism by a lack of corroborative sources, the biography of this short-lived late-medieval patriot has long been incorporated into the i