Literature and nationalism

Literature has long played a crucial role in constructing and disseminating what Benedict Anderson terms “imagined communities.” The invention of an English sense of national identity emerged in full in the Elizabethan period. The early modern period is a rich site for the study of literature and nationalism not only because this period witnessed profound and contested articulations of the political nation, but also because it bears witness to the ways in which nationalism is underpinned by a variety of cultural discourses, including class, gender, race, and religion

Remembering and forgetting the Scottish Highlands: Sir James Mackintosh and the forging of a British imperial identity

This article explores the formation of British imperial identity through a focus on the career of Sir James Mackintosh (1765–1832), a well-known Whig intellectual and imperial careerist who originally hailed from the Highlands of Scotland. Using Mackintosh's unpublished letters and autobiography, the article shows how he imagined and narrated his relationship to the Scottish Highlands from the vantage points of Bombay and London. In contrast to recent historiography that has focused on the translation of Scottish society, culture, and identity in British imperial spaces, this article argues that disidentification from the Highlands of Scotland and the erasure of different peoples, cultures, and textures of life was integral to Mackintosh's configuration of a British imperial identity

Maria Cosway’s Hours: Cosmopolitan and Classical Visual Culture in Thomas Macklin’s Poets Gallery

Thomas Macklin’s Gallery of Poets opened at the Mitre Tavern in Fleet Street in 1788 with the aim to ‘display British Genius’ through ‘Prints Illustrative of the Most Celebrated British Poets’. Early newspaper coverage promised ‘a monument of the powers of the pencil in England, as the Vatican is at Rome’. The incongruous juxtaposition between Fleet Street and the Vatican spells out the cosmopolitan ambition of the literary gallery phenomenon through its real and imagined geographies of display. Through the format of the paper gallery of prints, Macklin’s Poets offered the inventions of British Poets as a repository of painting. This chapter examines how the cosmopolitan idiom of the paper gallery is negotiated in the first number of Macklin’s Poets. This essay examines the extent to which this ambition was achieved in the first Number of Macklin’s Poets which carried an engraving of Maria Cosway’s The Hours, originally a painting with an impressively European iconographic heritage. The painting was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1783, and was retroactively associated by Macklin with Thomas Gray’s ‘Ode on the Spring’. The trope of the Hours brought with it a weighty provenance derived from classical marble bas-relief, through the antiquarian pages of Pietro Santi Bartoli and Bernard de Montfaucon to Flaxman’s designs for Wedgwood plaques and vases. Cosway’s name also imported into Gray’s poem her reputation as a cosmopolitan, cultured woman who had completed the Grand Tour and who moved in elite circles including those of the Prince of Wales in London and the Duke of Orleans, Pierre d’Hancarville and Thomas Jefferson in Paris. The iconographies of the painting, the print, and the poem articulate a European cosmopolitan tradition for British Art

Literary studies and the academy

In 1885 the University of Oxford invited applications for the newly created Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature. The holder of the chair was, according to the statutes, to ‘lecture and give instruction on the broad history and criticism of English Language and Literature, and on the works of approved English authors’. This was not in itself a particularly innovatory move, as the study of English vernacular literature had played some part in higher education in Britain for over a century. Oxford University had put English as a subject into its pass degree in 1873, had been participating since 1878 in extension teaching, of which literary study formed a significant part, and had since 1881 been setting special examinations in the subject for its non-graduating women students. What was new was the fact that this ancient university appeared to be on the verge of granting the solid academic legitimacy of an established chair to an institutionally marginal and often contentious intellectual pursuit, acknowledging the study of literary texts in English to be a fit subject not just for women and the educationally disadvantaged but also for university men

The Escape of the Goeben and Breslau: a reassessment

Donated by Klaus Kreise

Liman von Sanders and the German-Ottoman alliance

Donated by Klaus Kreise

War Premeditated? German Intelligence Operations in July 1914

Donated by Klaus Kreise