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Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales.

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Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales

By Philip Schwyzer Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004

Philip Schwyzer's Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales joins a growing body of scholarship by such critics as David Baker, Andrew Hadfield, Christopher Highley, and Willy Maley interested in the literary manifestations of what historians have termed the "British problem." Taking their cue from the New British History, these scholars attend carefully to the conflicts and intersections between English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh histories and the complexities of identity in the early modern Atlantic Archipelago. Schwyzer's distinctive contribution to the discussion is twofold: he challenges the assumption that English national consciousness could exist apart from ideas of Britishness, and he explores how Tudor national sentiments were formed and experienced in a period that predates nationhood. Recognizing that few Tudor writers traced their English identity to the "racial stock of the Anglo-Saxons, who were held in remarkably low esteem in the Elizabethan era" (5), Schwyzer cleverly points out that since British nationalism derived its identity from Welsh sources, the "nationalism of the English" was almost indistinguishable from Welsh national consciousness. Schwyzer aims to delineate a proto national sentiment, but he is prudent to explain that this "consciousness" is not yet a nationalism of...

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