Introduction

Authors

Lisa Kasmer, Clark UniversityFollow

Document Type

Book Chapter

Abstract

Britain's attempts to maintain a lasting and durable empire in the nineteenth century resulted in works like Joseph Mallord William Turner's celebrated 1840 painting Slave Ship, which punctures the illusory image of the absolute and global sovereignty of the British Empire. Even though Britain had abolished both the transatlantic slave trade and the institution of slavery by the time Turner exhibited Slave Ship, the painting acts as a perfect exemplum for the structuring of nineteenth-century national trauma within the British Empire. Both the loss integral to nationalism and national identity and national violence-imperialism, colonialism, and warfare-necessarily associate nation-formation with unimaginable trauma. Joep Leerssen insists, "all nationalism is cultural nationalism", which instantiates nationhood and national identity within material history and cultural memory. With traumatic memory the past is not "simply history as over and done with". There is a period of latency between an initial potentially traumatizing event and a later event that in some sense triggers a traumatic response.

Publication Title

Traumatic Tales: British Nationhood and National Trauma in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Publication Date

9-2017

First Page

1

Last Page

15

ISBN

9781315100487

DOI

10.4324/9781315100487

Keywords

national trauma, nineteenth century literature, British Empire, colonialism

Repository Citation

Kasmer, Lisa, "Introduction" (2017). English. 7.
https://commons.clarku.edu/facenglish/7