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.

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.

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.

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

In Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel, first published in 2000, Pericles Lewis shows how political debates over the sources and nature of 'national character' prompted radical experiments in narrative form amongst modernist writers. Though critics have accused the modern novel of shunning the external world, Lewis suggests that, far from abandoning nineteenth-century realists' concern with politics, the modernists used this emphasis on individual consciousness to address the distinctively political ways in which the modern nation-state shapes the psyche of its subjects. Tracing this theme through Joyce, Proust and Conrad, amongst others, Lewis claims that modern novelists gave life to a whole generation of narrators who forged new social realities in their own images. Their literary techniques - multiple narrators, transcriptions of consciousness, involuntary memory, and arcane symbolism - focused attention on the shaping of the individual by the nation and on the potential of the individual, in time of crisis, to redeem the nation.

Both celebrated and condemned, Ukrainian nationalism is one of the most controversial and vibrant topics in contemporary discussions of Eastern Europe. Perhaps today there is no more divisive and heatedly argued topic in Eastern European studies than the activities in the 1930s and 1940s of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). This book examines the legacy of the OUN and is the first to consider the movement’s literature alongside its politics and ideology. It argues that nationalism’s mythmaking, best expressed in its literature, played an important role. In the interwar period seven major writers developed the narrative structures that gave nationalism much of its appeal. For the first time, the remarkable impact of their work is recognized.