Nation & Narration

Bhabha, in his preface, writes 'Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully encounter their horizons in the mind's eye'.From this seemingly impossibly metaphorical beginning, this volume confronts the realities of the concept of nationhood as it is lived and the profound ambivalence of language as it is written. From Gillian Beer's reading of Virginia Woolf, Rachel Bowlby's cultural history of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Francis Mulhern's study of Leaviste's 'English ethics'; to Doris Sommer's study of the 'magical realism' of Latin American fiction and Sneja Gunew's analysis of Australian writing, Nation and Narration is a celebration of the fact that English is no longer an English national consciousness, which is not nationalist, but is the only thing that will give us an international dimension.

1 Introduction: narrating the nation 2 What is a nation? 3 Tribes within nations: the ancient Germans and the history of modem France 4 The national longing for form 5 Irresistible romance: the foundational fictions of Latin America 6 Denaturalizing cultural nationalisms: multicultural readings of' Australia' 7 Postal politics and the institution of the nation 8 Literature - Nationalism's other? The case for revision 9 Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Englishness of English art 10 Destiny made manifest: the styles of Whitman's poetry 11 Breakfast in America - Uncle Tom's cultural histories 12 Telescopic philanthropy: professionalism and responsibility in Bleak House 13 European pedigrees/African contagions: nationality, narrative, and communality in Tutuola, Achebe, and Reed 14 English reading 15 The island and the aeroplane: the case of Virginia Woolf 16 Dissemination: time, narrative, and the margins of the modem nation