The Literature of Nationalism concerns literature in its broadest sense and the manner in which, in belles lettres, the oral tradition and journalism, language and literature create national/nationalist myths. It treats East European culture from Finland to 'Yugoslavia', from Bohemia to Romania, from the nineteenth century to today. One third of the book concerns women and ethnic identity, and the rest covers subjects as varied as Bulgarian Fascism and the impact of political change on language in Hungary and ex-Yugoslavia.

In three elegant and important essays, originally published as pamphlets by Field Day Theatre Company, Terry Eagleton analyzes nationalism, identifying the radical contradictions that necessarily beset it; Fredric Jameson pursues the contradiction between the limited experience of the individual and the dispersed conditions that govern it; and Edward Said explores the work of Yeats as an exemplary and early instance of the process of decolonization. The introduction is by Seamus Deane. Paper edition (1863-1), $9.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Sarah Corse's analysis of nearly two hundred American and Canadian novels offers a theory of national literatures. Demonstrating that national canon formation occurs in tandem with nation-building, and that canonical novels play a symbolic role in this, this 1996 book accounts for cross-national literary differences, addresses issues of mediation and representation in theories of 'reflection', and illuminates the historically constructed nature of the relationship between literature and the nation-state.

This collection of essays traces the representation of nationalism in a number of literary texts, ranging from the poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt written at the court of Henry VIII to the plays of Tom Murphy written in Ireland in the 1980s. These essays have been conceived in honor of Philip Edwards, whose "Threshold of a Nation: Studies in English and Irish Drama" (1979) explored the inter-relations between ideas of drama and ideas of nationhood or national identity in the age of Shakespeare and in the age of Yeats. They focus mainly on these two periods and on the troubled interaction between English and Irish nationalism, but Cowper, Coleridge, Byron and Strindberg are also featured. The writers discussed, whether they are ostensibly celebrating the innocent early days of English imperialism, reacting to the French Revolution and the rise and fall of Napoleon, or doggedly rewriting the story of "National Question" in Ireland, include those who are attracted by the glamour of nationalism and eager to participate in its rhetoric as well as those who are sceptical, cynical, even hostile. Nationalism can enter literature as panegyric or elegy, tragedy or farce.

How often do we think of cultural humiliation and failure as strengths? Against prevailing views on what it means to enjoy power as individuals, cultures, or nations, this provocative book looks at the making of cultural and national identities in modern China as building success on failure. It reveals the exercise of sovereign power where we least expect it and shows how this is crucial to our understanding of a modern world of conflict, violence, passionate suffering, and cultural difference.

A study of Native literature from the perspective of national sovereignty and self-determination.

This book tells the story of how intellectuals in the English-speaking Caribbean first created a distinctly Caribbean and national literature. As traditionally told, this story begins in the 1950s with the arrival and triumph of V.S. Naipaul, George Lamming, and their peers in the London literary scene. However, Afro-Caribbeans were writing literature already in the 1840s as part of larger movements for political rights, economic opportunity, and social status. Rosenberg offers a history of this first one hundred years of anglophone Caribbean literature and a critique of Caribbean literary studies that explains its neglect. A historically contextualized study of both canonical and noncanonical writers, this book makes the case that the few well-known Caribbean writers from this earlier period, Claude McKay, Jean Rhys, and C.L.R. James, participated in a larger Caribbean literary movement that directly contributed to the rise of nationalism in the region. This movement reveals the prominence of Indian and other immigrant groups, of feminism, and of homosexuality in the formation of national literatures.