Nation and Narration

Front Cover
Homi K. Bhabha
Psychology Press, 1990 - Literary Criticism - 333 pages

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.

 

Selected pages

Contents

Introduction narrating the nation
1
What is a nation?
8
Tribes within nations the ancient Germans and the history of modern France
23
The national longing for form
44
Irresistible romance the foundational fictions of Latin America
71
Denaturalizing cultural nationalisms multicultural readings of Australia
99
Postal politics and the institution of the nation
121
Literature Nationalisms other? The case for revision
138
Destiny made manifest the styles of Whitmans poetry
177
Breakfast in America Uncle Tom s cultural histories
197
Telescopic philanthropy professionalism and responsibility in Bleak House
213
European pedigreesAfrican contagions nationality narrative and communality in Tutuola Achebe and Reed
231
English reading
250
The island and the aeroplane the case of Virginia Woolf
265
DissemiNation time narrative and the margins of the modern nation
291
Index
323

Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Englishness of English art
154

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Bibliographic information