Joep Leerssen

The rhetoric of national character: introduction

Cultural, literary, and popular representations of collective peculiarities and behaviour frequently invoke ‘national character’ as a motivating explanation. Stereotypical in nature, such characters consist of attributions and prejudices established intertextually in a long tropical tradition. The study of such images of national character, originally established as a specialism in Comparative Literature known as ‘imagology’, has in recent years been attracting fresh interest. Imagology is based on, but not limited to, the inventory and typology of how nations are typified, represented, and/or caricatured in a given tradition or corpus of cultural articulations. On the basis of the analysis of texts or cultural artefacts, it raises questions about the mechanism of national/ethnic ‘othering’ and its underlying selfimages. Questions raised concern the relation between ‘character’ and ‘identity’; historical variability; genre, canonicity, and irony; and intermediality. As a specialism in Comparative Literature, imagology originally enjoyed a marginalized status, first as a result of René Wellek’s emphasis on the aesthetic analysis of what made literary texts ‘literary’, and later by the turn towards antihistoricist theory. Kept alive by only a handful of scholars (Hugo Dyserinck in Aachen foremost among them) the specialism of imagology saw a renewed flourish in the 1980s and 1990s, when the historically constructed nature of perceived ‘identities’ became a matter of reflection for various disciplines: Anthropology, cultural history, and (rather belatedly also) literary studies. A theoretical agenda for this newly emerging situation was outlined in an article that also furnished the title for the present issue of the European Journal of English Studies (cf. Leerssen, 2000). The interdisciplinary revival of imagology has meanwhile also found its main consolidation in a large-scale compendium (Beller and Leerssen, 2007). In line with these developments, this issue of the European Journal of English Studies seeks to apply the method and topical focus of imagology not to the transnationally-comparative scope of Comparative Literature but towards the study of fundamental assumptions within a single literature. It does so by bringing together a series of essays on the rhetoric of national character from Alfred the Great to Fawlty Towers by specialists across the discipline of English Studies. English Studies has over the last decade been exploring a rich vein in the study of images of the exotic and the extra-European other, particularly in early literature and culture, with Shakespeare Studies as the perennial testing ground. Interestingly, the field is dominated by studies on Anglo-French relations and their impact of English or British culture, and includes such notable studies as Richard Hillman’s Shakespeare, Marlowe, and the Politics of France (2002), Deanne Williams’s The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare (2004), and Jean-Christophe Mayer’s Representing France and the French in Early Modern English Drama (2008). Judging by the harvest of studies devoted

Englishness, ethnicity and Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnolds lecture series ‘On the Study of Celtic Literature’ is famous as part of his ongoing battle against stolid Victorianism, and as the starting point of Celticism in the British Isles. It should also be read as a programmatic manifesto for the cultivation of literary Englishness. Rather than perpetuating an ingrained usage of the ethnic German-Latin opposition in order to label moral and temperamental aspects of Englishness, Arnold places English culture in a polarity between German and Celtic ethnotypes. That Arnold should use this polarity is not only a matter of personal family background, but also a cultural transfer from France: Arnold takes his Celticism, with its entire anti-German subtext, from his French inspiration, Ernest Renan.

The nation’s canon and the book trade

Taking the case of a book series claiming to be a ‘Library of the Complete German National Literature’ (running from 1835 until the early 1860s), this article looks at the emergence of a readership for the medieval classics in what was, around these decades, becoming a self-evidently national canon. The commercially-driven enterprise is here presented, not only in the context of the ongoing professionalisation and growing academic prestige and ethos of the philologies, but also in its competition with the dissemination forum of bibliophile societies with publications-for-members. Between sociability, academic careerism and a widening appeal of ‘nationality’, the popularisation and nationwide acceptance of the idea of a ‘national literature’ as a self-evident taxonomic unit is here traced in its early, hesitant beginnings.

Theatre as a Moral Institution: Twentieth-Century Ireland

Joep Leerssen discusses how theatre contributed to the formation of an independent Irish public sphere in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by examining William Butler Yeats’s Kathleen Ni Houlihan (1892/1912), J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (1907) and Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars (1926). He concludes his contribution by presenting two late-twentieth-century plays, Brian Friel’s Translations (1980) and Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985), that both thematize the national tensions in Northern Ireland. Leerssen demonstrates that independence and the relationships between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, and Great Britain has been a recurrent theme not only in politics but in the theatre too, and in fact functions rather like a connective tissue between the plays examined. A similar focus can be seen in plays written during the struggle for independence in the early twentieth century as well as in plays written in the wake of ‘The Troubles’. The last play Leerssen discusses, McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985) underlines once more the function of theatre as a moral institution. What is more, it shows that by openly discussing issues of identity and belonging a national play can contribute to the creation of a feeling of mutual understanding, and by doing so can present an inclusive notion of national identity.

Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe

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Literary Appropriations of the Rhine : A German–French Repertory, 1814–1925

The following poetical and discursive texts, documenting, in chronological order, competing German and French appropriations of the Rhineland in the “long nineteenth century”, are drawn from the textbase of the Study Platform of Interlocking Nationalisms (spin), where they can be found online (http://show.ernie.uva.nl/rhine). The poetic texts are given both in the original and in English translation. The French prose texts are given in the original, the German prose texts in English translation (the originals being online at spin). The translations were taken either from published English editions, or else made by Joep Leerssen. The selection was made by Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen.

The Rhine : National tensions, Romantic visions

Of all European landscapes and regions, the Rhine is one of the most heavily overlaid with cultural and political meaning. Cradle of Romanticism, tourism, and the picturesque, bone of contention between the German and French spheres of cultural and geopolitical influence, the Rhine has attracted armies, artists, activists and tourists for centuries and has featured prominently the key writings of Europe’s literary and intellectual history from Byron to Lucien Febvre. This volume brings together eminent literary and cultural historians to present materials and analyses from various of the central nexus of European culture. The volume also contains a unique and comprehensive anthology of key texts (historical, poetical and polemical) related to the Rhineland and its contested position.

Gods, Heroes, and Mythologists: Romantic Scholars and the Pagan Roots of Europe’s Nations

This article traces the scholarly interest in Europe’s non-Classical mythologies, from the rise of Edda studies in late eighteenth-century Denmark to the appropriation of Celtic origin myths in Spanish Galicia, and the flourish of overlapping Baltic mythologies between Tallinn and Vilnius, in the decades before 1900. Mythological studies attracted many important scholars (most notably Jacob Grimm, who published his benchmark Deutsche Mythologie in 1835), reached large readerships and inspired many artists, writers and composers. The progress and spread of this field of knowledge production is, however, extremely difficult to trace because it remained a cultural pursuit and never quite became a scholarly discipline. Its methods were heterogeneous and contradictory, combining the comparatist historicism of the New Philology with a tendency to leap from documentation to fanciful interpretation. The failure of the mythological pursuit to achieve academic consolidation stands in intriguing contrast to its popularity and its successful activation of a multinational repertoire of mythical figures and themes—sometimes reliably documented, often speculative, and always a welcome fuel for nationalist consciousness raising.

The Adventures of an Amsterdam Spaniard: Nation-building in a 17th-century Dutch Pseudo-translation

Translations are not produced in a void, but in a continuum of textual and extra-textual constraints. The history of translation is rich in examples of the ways translation can be used in the service of ideological agendas. Particularly interesting is the genre of pseudo-translations, since they attempt to match the existing images and expectations of their readers, while engaging with contemporary discourses. In the context of the Eighty Years’ War between the Dutch Republic and the Spanish monarchy (1568–1648), it is not a coincidence that translator and pseudo-translator G. De Bay decided to use this recent period of Dutch history in his pseudo-translations (1658, 1671). In his On the Hell and Purgatory of the world or The Life of the Amsterdam Spaniard (1671), De Bay plays with and perpetuates images about a past that were shared by his audience and that were starting to become a ‘national’ past. To attract his readers’ attention, he presented his works as translations from the Spanish to give them an air of mystery, since they were supposed to have been written by the old enemy. His imitation of the successful Spanish genre of the picaresque novel was also a successful narrative strategy since this genre was much liked among the Dutch public and presented – when taken literally – a negative image of the Spaniards and their country. Literary works such as those by De Bay render the origin of collective national identities tangible, since we know that a collective sense of identity is derived from shared historical awareness.

Convulsion Recalled: Aftermath and Cultural Memory (Post-1798 Ireland)

It is no coincidence that the field of memory studies or ‘mnemohistory’ has been deeply influenced by scholars with a background in literary rather than social-political history — from Aleida and Jan Assmann, by way of Ansgar Nunning and Astrid Erll, to Ann Rigney and Michael Rothberg. Of all the historical sciences, literary history is perhaps the specialism that is most consciously aware of the duality of history, its oscillation between event and experience, between occurrence and recall. As the great Prague structuralist Felix Vodicka ([1943] 1976) argued, the historicity of a text works along multiple chronologies. It depends, not only on the dynamics of cultural production — placing Laurence Sterne into the pre-Romantic run-up to Holderlin and Keats — but also in the ongoing accretion of successive readings and interpre-tations. Each of these readings and interpretations harks back to the original text, but each also falls under the shadow of all previous readings and interpretations, overlays covering the original text. This double historicity — the succession of texts along the time-axis of their authors’ productivity, and the accumulation of meanings along the time-axis of their readers’ reception — complicates the chronology. Keats, long after his death, became one of the great poets of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and of the fin de siecle, following which he was succeeded by Holderlin (the mystic-existentialist inspiration of the George Circle and of Martin Heidegger), both finally overtaken by Tristram Shandy (that foundational text for late twentieth-century postmodernism).