Nationalism

[Extract]... old literary-historical truisms about Richardson’s centrality to English fiction – and, even more, to an anglophone account of the ‘rise of the novel’ understood in Ian Watt’s terms – are not simply to be dismissed. His narratives do have a particular relation to the nation, and that is what makes it possible to align them to nationalism, even if we need to recontextualise their ‘English solidity’ (to use Webster’s phrase) in light of the broader historical and geographical contexts in which ideas of national identity and culture were formed. To think like this is to draw on the scholarship of nationalism itself, which asks, forthrightly enough, what is nationalism? What are its modes and pre- formations? Did they exist in England in the eighteenth century? If so, in what forms, and to what extent, were they specifically English, British, or both? It is through such questions that we can more fully understand Richardson’s relation to nationalism.