ABSTRACT
Reading the Nation in English Literature is a resource of primary materials and introductory essays on the historical, critical, and theoretical studies of the ideologies, discourses, and practices of nationhood in the English-speaking Western world from 1550-1850. e fl exible design of this Reader is intended to strike a balance between primary and secondary material, and the international and comparative perspective to show that ideas of nationhood are both varied and relational in literatures in English. As Sarah M. Corse notes in her chapter, “‘Reading the nation’ is more than a metaphor: it is a reference to the ways that national literatures may literally read a nation into being” (p. 215). National identity in the British Isles is neither natural nor self-produced but rather was fashioned in relation to the nations of the Atlantic archipelago (England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales), as well as through ideological and materialist associations with continental and transatlantic nations-and vice versa, as our epigraph from Du Ponceau attests. By showing how various early forms of nationhood were written and the multiple ways in which they can be read, we also suggest that the early modern through to the Romantic invites a rethinking of the modernist position on questions of nation and nationalism.
