ABSTRACT
History and memory intersect in various, complicated ways throughout the nineteenth century, especially in the rise of autobiographical discourses, but I wish to distinguish a particularly volatile, gendered form of this intersection. My focus centres on a relatively understudied component of that cultural process, associated by Benedict Anderson with the growth of European nationalisms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, through which history was constructed to produce collective memories that help solidify ‘imagined’ communities and their political aspirations.1 The ‘desire’ for this kind of historical memory, as Stephen Bann terms it in his recent book on Romantic historiography,2 emerged around the turn of the nineteenth century as an intense compulsion, shared across multiple class and national boundaries, that pervaded European academic institutions, literary discourses, philosophical circles, scientific inquiry, antiquarian societies, the visual arts, architecture, museum culture, public theatre and spectacle. Bann, following Foucault, attributes this unprecedented fascination with the past, in part, to an extreme historical nostalgia caused by the general decentring of the subject in the later eighteenth century. But the most immediate force mobilizing Clio’s massive popularity, Bann and Anderson would agree, involved the growing power of historical memory to authorize competing political communities, along with their postulated rights and imperatives, amid the social dislocations caused by the French Revolution and the spread of nationalisms. Hence the prodigious, creatively exuberant outpouring of countless narrative, theatrical, and pictorial histories of nationalities, ethnic groups, economic classes, monarchies and nobilities, artistic traditions, linguistic and religious communities, all of which transformed history into a commanding discipline of knowledge and power around the turn of the nineteenth century. I am particularly
concerned here with the gender dynamics of such a formidable cultural investment in historical memory. For the gendering of historical memories and their related imagined communities bears striking and generally unexamined implications for the recovery work on women writers that is currently revolutionizing studies of British literary Romanticism
Recent groundbreaking studies on Romantic era women writers and gender by Anne Mellor, Marlon Ross, and Stuart Curran, among others, have inspired one of the most vigorous reassessments ever of literary Romanticism, through which major reappraisals of women writers and their resistance to the gender codes of their time continue to open up the canonical and ideological limits of Romanticism.3
