Yoon Sun Lee. Nationalism and Irony: Burke, Scott, Carlyle.(Book review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-06

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COPYRIGHT 2006 Boston University

Yoon Sun Lee. Nationalism and Irony: Burke, Scott, Carlyle. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. 232. $60.00.

This interesting new study brings together two concepts which, taken separately, are well-established tools in the rhetorical bag of tricks of every modern student of Romanticism: nationalism and irony. Nationalism, in the particular context of Britain at war for much of the 1790s and the first fifteen years of the new century, has long been viewed as the counterrevolutionary orthodoxy of a people united on the large scale by their shared or replicated local bonds of intimacy with things on the small scale: with the little plot of ground to which they belong, with family, and with traditional values. Undoubtedly a matter of political urgency, Romantic nationalism, according to this argument, wraps defensive civic policy in the naturalizing tropes of instinctual ties: attachment to land,...

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