Publisher's Synopsis
This timely interdisciplinary study traces the evolution of nativist cultural movements in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales as a response, and as a reaction, to the consolidation of the British nation state across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Gothic Britain analyses texts as diverse as the Earl of Shaftesbury's Characteristics (1711) and Arthur Machen's The Hill of Dreams (1907) to consider the critiques of the Union that individual writers offered over two centuries. By examining various texts from Gothic and Celtic literature, an emergent critical theory, nineteenth-century ethnographic studies, political tracts and late-Victorian art history, this study contends that the modern disciplines of the Humanities in the U.K. have been shaped in response to the particular political exigencies of the Union. Less cultural history than a history of 'Culture', Gothic Britain invites readers to rethink the relationship between the Academy, literary culture, Empire and nationalism in the British experience.
