Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire

This magisterial work links the literary and intellectual history of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Britain's overseas colonies during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to redraw our picture of the origins of cultural nationalism, the lineages of the novel, and the literary history of the English-speaking world. Katie Trumpener recovers and recontextualizes a vast body of fiction to describe the history of the novel during a period of formal experimentation and political engagement, between its eighteenth-century "rise" and its Victorian "heyday."