Nations and nationalisms

France, Britain, Ireland and the eighteenth-century context

Volume: 335

Series: SVEC

Volume Editors: Michael O'Dea and Kevin Whelan

Series Collaborators: Thomas Bartlett; Desmond M. Clarke; Linda Colley; Alain-Jacques Czouz-Tornare; Séamus Deane; David J. Denby; R. A. Francis; Beatrice Fink; Martin Fitzpatrick; Michel Fuchs; Patrick Jager; Patrick Kelly; Máire Kennedy; Edna Hindie Lemay; Pierre Lurbe; T. O. McLoughlin; Evelyne Maradan; Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre; Simone Carpentari-Messina; Breandán Ó Buachalla; Judith K. Proud; Enid L. Stockwell; Jean-Jacques Tatin-Gourier; Michel Vovelle; Kevin Whelan

Publication Date: 1995

Pages: 375

ISBN: 978-0-7294-0510-2

Price: £60

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At a moment when nationalism is resurgent and stubbornly refuses to obey past predictions of its imminent demise, a scholarly return to the inaugurating eighteenth-century debates about nationalism, nations and the nation state seems not only desirable but necessary. This collection of essays surveys the issues under eight headings, with the French Revolution as a recurring reference point – not least because of the tension within the Revolution between national interests and universal aspirations, a tension that arguably continues to beset modern ideas of the nation.
The volume offers a broad survey of current thinking on the eighteenth-century nation and the emerging nationalisms of the age. Clusters of essays provide extended treatment of the certain major topics, while others give unexpected sidelights involving figures as diverse as John Toland (Irish philosopher) and Brillat-Savarin (French gastronome and cosmopolitan nationalist). All combine to provide a clear focus on an area of eighteenth-century studies of continuing relevance to the modern reader in Europe and beyond.
Acknowledgements
Michael O’Dea and Kevin Whelan, Introduction
I. Ideas of the nation in the French Revolution
Michel Vovelle, Entre cosmopolitisme et xénophobie: patrie, nation, république universelle dans les idéologies de la Révolution française
David J. Denby, Individual, universal, national: a French revolutionary trilogy?
Edna Hindie Lemay, L’intérêt de la ‘nation’ dans le débat sur le droit de déclarer la guerre ou la paix à l’Assemblée constituante (15-22 mai 1790)
Jean-Jacques Tatin-Gourier, Figures de l’émigration dans les Lettres écrites de Barcelone de Pierre-Nicolas Chantreau (1792)
II. Great Britain and Ireland
Linda Colley, Britishness and Otherness: an argument
Thomas Bartlett, Protestant nationalism in eighteenth-century Ireland
Patrick Kelly, Nationalism and the contemporary historians of the Jacobite war in Ireland
Breadán ó Buachalla, Irish Jacobitism and Irish nationalism: the literary evidence
III. France and Ireland
Michel Fuchs, France and Irish nationalism in the eighteenth century
T. O. McLoughlin, A crisis for the Irish in Bordeaux: 1756
Máire Kennedy, Nations of the mind: French culture in Ireland and the international booktrade
IV. Emerging national identities
Anne-Marie Mercier Faivre, La nation par la langue: philologie, nationalisme et nation dans l’Europe du dix-huitième siècle
Judith K. Proud, ‘Belgium’ in the eighteenth century: politics and culture, fact and fiction
Alain-Jacques Czouz-Tornare et Evelyne Maradan, Un anti-nationalisme: la ‘nation suisse’ à la fin du dix-huitième siècle
V. Echoes of the French Revolution
Martin Fitzpatrick, Patriots and patriotisms: Richard Price and the early reception of the French Revolution in England
Kevin Whelan, United and disunited Irishmen: the discourse of sectarianism in the 1790s
VI. John Toland, tolerance and the nation
Pierre Lurbe, John Toland, cosmopolitanism, and the concept of nation
Desmond M. Clarke, Locke and Toland on toleration
VII. The enlightened traveller?
Séamus Deane, Virtue, travel and the Enlightenment
Joseph McMinn, Hottentots and Teagues: Swift and barbarous nations
Simone Carpentari Messina, James Boswell et l’énigme corse
Patrick Jager, Comment peut-on être arabe? Regards des voyageurs sur les nations levantines
R. A. Francis and Enid L. Stockwell, Nationhood and cosmopolitanism in the journalism and novels of the Abbé Prévost
VIII. Gastronomy and destiny
Beatrice Fink, Brillat-Savarin and the destiny of nations
Index

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