Introduction

Abstract

In his influential Imagined Communities (1983) Benedict Anderson claims that the modern nation is given existence in part through its representation as a definable community. Symbol and narrative, he argues, subsume diverse and often conflicting components under the rubric of a uniform national identity.¹ If the modern nation required such a representational (if not actual) unity in order to come into being, however, what conceptions of nationness had to be excluded or suppressed in order to achieve this unity? Early nineteenth-century British writing provides a useful focus for examining this question because it demonstrates a complex response to political and philosophical upheavals both on the continent and within imperial Britain itself and sets out the terms for future debate over the question of nation. In popular Romantic forms such as the national tale and the lyrical ballad, British writers (both English and Colonial) struggled to found nationality in, among other things, language, history, blood, and geography. While such formulations have recently come under critical scrutiny, most critical study continues to assume a unified model of the nation. My interest in this book, by contrast, lies in the non-unified formulations of nationness that were also circulating at the time, notably in the notion of cosmopolitanism.²