Imagining Nationns

by Geoffrey Cubitt

• ISBN13: 9780719054600
• ISBN10: 0719054605
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 1999-02-15
• Publisher: Manchester University Press

Summary

The concept of the nation is central to modern understandings both of political community and of personal identity. Notions of national distinctiveness and of international competition dominate the ways in which we think about history, about geography, about culture and economics and human character. The essays in this book seek to understand the complex ways in which nations are imaginatively constructed. Dealing chiefly with British and German examples, but relating these examples to wider conceptual and theoretical issues, they illustrate both the diversity and the potential of a cultural approach to nationhood and nationalism. The book is conceived in an interdisciplinary spirit, drawing insights from intellectual history, art history, geography, and literary studies, and tracing the implications of nationalist habits of thought across fields as varied as historiography, cartography, visual art, science and economic statistics. Taken together, the essays offer a wide-ranging exploration of the cultural, ideological and intellectual processes through which national identities are developed, debated and articulated.

Author Biography

Geoffrey Cubitt is Lecturer in History at the University of York.

Table of Contents

List of figures	vii
Notes on contributors	ix
Acknowledgements	xi
Introduction	1	(21)
Geoffrey Cubitt
PART I CONCEPTUALISING NATIONALITY
Beyond the liberal idea of the nation	22	(16)
Nicholas Stargardt
PART II THE NATION IN TIME
Storylines: narratives and nationality in nineteenth-century Ireland	38	(19)
Roy Foster
Tacitus engendered: `Gothic feminism' and British histories, c. 1750--1800	57	(18)
Jane Rendall
The redeeming Teuton: nineteenth-century notions of the 'Germanic' in England and Germany	75	(17)
Maike Oergel
Paving the `peculiar path': German nationalism and historiography since Ranke	92	(20)
Peter Lambert
PART III THE NATION IN SPACE
Mapping national identities: the culture of cartography, with particular reference to the Ordnance Survey	112	(20)
Stephen Daniels
`All ocean is her own': the image of the sea and the identity of the maritime nation in eighteenth-century British art	132	(21)
Geoff Quilley
Border crossings: Cornwall and the English (imagi)nation	153	(20)
James Vernon
`What should they know of England who only England know?': Kipling on the boundaries of gender, art and empire	173	(19)
Joanna de Groot
PART IV THE INVENTORY OF NATIONHOOD
Science and nationhood: cultures of imagined communities	192	(20)
Ludmilla Jordanova
Imagining national economies: national and international economic statistics, 1900--1950	212	(17)
J. Adam Tooze
Money and nationalism	229	(26)
Marcia Pointon
Index	255