Nationalism in Early Modern Literature

Dear Colleagues,

In Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (1992), Liah Greenfeld famously and firmly locates the emergence of the modern idea of the nation in sixteenth-century England. Greenfeld’s claim that “by 1600, the existence in England of a national consciousness and identity, and as a result, of a new geo-political entity, a nation, was a fact” still holds sway.[1] This was a good year for studies of early modern nationalism: 1992 also witnessed the publication of Richard Helgerson’s magisterial Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England. Historians and literary historians have, however, contested Greenfeld’s and Helgerson’s Gauntean neglect of the larger geopolitical context in which “this England” emerged and from which it was written. In a recent volume of essays on early modern nationalism and “Milton’s England”, dedicated to Helgerson, the richest readings are those that test the boundaries of “Milton’s England”. Writing in 1642, Milton describes “the British Ilands ” as “my world”, inviting us to situate his complicated republican- and Protestant-inflected nationalism within a wider British and Irish context.[2] Much is to be gained by reading Milton’s nationalism, his sense of himself as “John Milton, Englishman” in relation to Britain as well as Britishness, which, Thomas Corns notes, is both the precursor and successor to mid-seventeenth-century Englishness.[3]

Did an English monarch ever rule in the early modern period? Welsh blood ran in Tudor monarchs’ veins. In 1603, Scotland’s monarch succeeded Queen Elizabeth, and his son, in whose execution Milton had more than a hand, was born in Fife. To say that the Stewart accession to the English throne owed everything to James’s Anglo-Welsh great grandmother Margaret Tudor, a Queen of Scotland by way of marriage to King James IV, would not be inaccurate. King Henry VIII’s reign saw England emerge from Rome’s shadow as an independent nation. If this realm of England was an “empire”, it was an empire that included a politically incorporated Wales. Were the Welsh, then, not Henry’s countrymen, just as Fluellen is the King’s in Shakespeare’s Henry V? Although he claimed suzerainty over Scotland and altered his title from “Lord” to “King” of Ireland, Henry never fashioned his rule in explicitly British terms. Under the composite monarchy established by the Scottish Stewarts, however, a sense of Britishness, within court settings at least, competed with an entrenched and insular Englishness. Beyond Whitehall, this period witnessed the shaping and reshaping of collective identities in the form of oppositional, overlapping, intersecting English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh identities. A new geopolitical entity was indeed taking shape.

This volume takes a fresh approach to nationhood, national identity and nationalism in early modern literature by exploring these concepts within a wider British and Irish, archipelagic, indeed transatlantic, framework.

This Special Issue seeks contributions that address any aspect of this topic, including but not limited to the following:

• Articulations of national consciousness in women’s writing in the early modern period;
• Assertions and reimaginings of national identities within the context of Jacobean Union debate;
• “Britons” abroad;
• Intersecting confessional and national identities;
• Irish, Welsh, Scottish dimensions in “English” history plays;
• Knowledge communities and communal identities;
• Nationhood, national identities and nationalism at the time of regnal transitions;
• Representations of and attitudes to ancient Britons;
• Republican and proto-republican nationalism;
• Residual and emergent collective identities;
• Social status and national identity;
• Transnational literary and patronage networks.

[1] Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 30.

[2] John Milton, The Reason of Church-government Urg’d against Prelaty (London: 1642), p. 38.

[3] Thomas N. Corns, ‘Milton and the Limitations of Englishness’, in Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England, ed. by David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), pp. 205-216.

Manuscripts ranging from 6,000 to 12,000 words should be submitted to Humanities Editorial Office. For Manuscript Submission Information, please see below.

Dr. Christopher Ivic
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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• Britain
• Britishness
• Britons
• early modern nationhood
• early modern nationalism
• England
• Ireland
• memory
• national identity
• republicanism
• Scotland
• Union
• Wales