Chivalry and nostalgia: British literature and national identity, 1820-1845

Over the past few decades, major studies of nineteenth-century British medievalism have primarily taken the form of art or literature surveys that concentrate on aesthetics, social criticism, and authorial influence. This study offers a different approach by focusing on the relation between conservative medievalist literature, the formation of national identity, and conservative or Tory models of subjectivity. It concentrates on one particular strain of British national identity that emerged between 1820 and 1845 as it appeared in the texts of Scott, Hemans, Tennyson, and Disraeli. Their progressive Tory nationalism valorized a hierarchical and patriarchal model of the British nation and promoted new nationalized subject positions based on domesticated, nostalgic versions of British chivalry, aristocratic leadership, Tory paternalism, and Christian heroism.; Chapter one sketches the development of Tory-medievalist nationalism from its roots in Burke's sentimental appeals to traditional familial and social relations to its further elaboration in the works of Digby, Coleridge, the Christian Socialists, and the rhetoric of Tory paternalism. Chapter two reads two of Scott's medieval novels, Ivanhoe and The Talisman, as part of an effort to defend a traditional form of national organization and revise aristocratic governance in the context of radical reform agitation. Chapter three argues that Felicia Hemans's poetry (from Songs of the Affections) and her verse drama, The Vespers of Palermo, promote traditional, sentimentalized subject positions and the practice of nostalgic memorialization as conservative ideological means to stabilize a personal, familial, and national identity. The next chapter demonstrates how Tennyson's early poetry explores the aesthetic subject-forming effects of conservative nostalgia. Rather than advocating conservative socio-political programs, his poetry enshrines the interpellating power of poetic language, nostalgia, and medievalist imagery. The final chapter argues that Disraeli's Sybil tries to subvert a competing version of radical Tory nationalism that circulated through the literature and rhetoric of "Tory Chartism." Disraeli defuses this competing Tory ideology by appropriating its ideals for his Young England Tory-paternalist version of national organization.