This chapter begins in medias res; it traces and exemplifies Romantic historicism and its enduring potency in the political imagination of the two World Wars. Two specific legacies of Romanticism are identified: the idea that the nation is a transcendent principle deserving our devotion and loyalty; and the paradox that the nation, while inspiring our fervent political allegiance, it is itself not political or contentious but, rather, ‘unpolitical’. This twofold legacy explains the title of this book, Charismatic Nations. That concept is also discussed with reference to the emergence, in the century between Edmund Burke and Max Weber, of the notion of ‘charismatic leadership’; it is suggested that such leaders, as typified by Weber, often derive their charisma from the fact that they are seen to intuit and address the historical needs of the nation as a unified whole.

The Romantic interest in popular and oral traditions accompanied the historicist interest in ancient manuscript materials but turned to living performers rather than to archives for its sources. This interest in oral-performative literature as a window on a nation’s ancient imagination was especially strong in the more peripheral parts of Europe, from the Scottish Highlands to the Balkans and the Baltic, but was theorized most effectively by the eminent German scholar Jacob Grimm. It deepened into an ethnographic interest in ancient national myths. It was felt that studying the roots of the nation’s language, customs and legends could map its primeval world-view and document the workings of its essential character or Volksgeist.

The Conclusion reviews Plath’s engagement with the supernatural within the political, cultural, and literary context of post-war America and Britain. It summarises the nuances of concepts like witch, witchcraft, black and white magic, and their relation to gender and power. The Conclusion also emphasises the importance of examining Plath’s manuscripts and additional archival materials, which her demonstrate continuous interest in magical themes around gender power dynamics. Sylvia Plath and the Supernatural concludes that the re-examination of Plath’s works with an approach of the supernatural is timely and significant not only for Plath scholarship but for literary studies. It positions the comprehensive analysis of this book in the historical reckoning with witch trials and reflects on the lasting relationship between the language of magic and poetry.

From the mid-nineteenth century on, the nation’s authentic character was sought among the ‘timeless’ countryfolk rather than in its ancient ancestry. Paradoxically, this turn from ‘past to peasant’ took place during a period of accelerated, technology-driven and urbanizing modernity, as more unrestricted, commercially driven, mass-appeal cultural media became available. This chapter traces the interaction between the modern city and the timeless country, from world fairs to the art theatres of the fin-de-siècle. The chapter concludes by outlining how the new modern and decorative arts (Arts and Crafts, art nouveau) functioned as carriers of progressive national revival movements in Europe’s sub-imperial capitals, from Dublin and Barcelona to Prague and Riga; and how their anti-imperial emancipation agenda was uneasily poised between progressive cosmopolitanism and nativist essentialism.

Pastoral has some claims to be the genre of classical tradition and, after antiquity, the genre that most persistently tropes classical tradition itself as a genre. At one level, post-antique pastoral will always transcend the (already manoeuvrable) ancient limits of the genre, expanding into the magical rural space of ‘paganism’ at large, or unlocking allegories that render prelate or ruler – or poet – as a Davidian or Christ-like ‘good shepherd’. Yet the pastoral poem will always allow its transcultural conversations to revert once more to the first linguistic principles of a Virgilian Eclogue – at times literally, word by word. Different worlds of early modern ‘pastoral philology’ are sampled here in the Bucolicum carmen of Petrarch, in the Latin eclogues of Baptista Mantuan, and in the English Shepheardes Calender of Spenser. And all three poets are found to draw from the Virgil of the Fourth (‘messianic’) Eclogue some kind of interest in a pastorally inflected salvation, whether temporal, spiritual, or both at once. The chapter ends with three eclogues by Seamus Heaney, a poet of our own time with a deep understanding of the ‘staying power’ of pastoral.

This chapter focuses on Pasolini's film Edipe Re (1967), his love poem to his mother, and his play Affabulacione (1966). The latter is concerned with a father who turns into a jealous lover of his son. He is so possessive of his son that he ends up killing the son. A reversal of Oedipus and Sophocles' ghost is a key character in the play. Thus Affublacione or Fabrications problematizes incest as a gay reversal of the Oedipus complex. The crucial point is that the reversal of Oedipus in Pasolini's play Affabulacione is Oedipal too: it is premised on the desire for power and the power of desire. Art and psychoanalysis here meet politics. The political aspect of mental life and its deceptive representations are also pertinent for a better understanding of Pasolini’s early films, Mamma Roma (1962) and Accatone (1961).

This chapter discusses the problematic but ubiquitous attempts by nineteenth-century linguists to map languages onto language areas and to map states onto those. Languages occupy an uneasy scalar position between dialects and language families: ‘splitters’ will concede an independent status to smaller variants, ‘lumpers’ will group all these variants together into greater wholes. By the same logic, sometimes small language areas are seen as the separate territorial footprints of independent language groups justifying their separate nationhood, while others might claim those areas as part of a larger national whole, as in the case of German expansionism vis-à-vis Schleswig-Holstein and the Low Countries. This chapter discusses the uneasy scalar taxonomy of the Slavic language family as treated by ‘lumping’ pan-Slavic and ‘splitting’ separatist tendencies. The macronationalism of language families constituted a support network for separate national movements in various countries (as in the case of pan-Celticism or pan-Slavism). Macronationalism could also shade into a racial logic for ethnolinguistic macro-groups such as the speakers of Germanic, Indo-European or putative ‘Turanian’ languages.

This chapter reads the criticism of I. A. Richards in relation to the tradition of scientific reading sketched in this book, positioning him as a theoretician of linguistic exactitude. Far from Empsonian ‘ambiguity’, Richards’s overall investment in the striving for linguistic clarity reconfigures how we should view his place in the history of the discipline. If close reading is a practice that today prizes ambiguity, contradiction and the play of the signifier, then Richards sits awkwardly as its founder – and, towards the end of his career, Richards would even wonder out loud whether a literary criticism based on exactitude could help facilitate a one-world liberal government. The chapter ends by returning to the question of artifice and the knowledge it can produce, focussing on the Cambridge-based poet Veronica Forrest-Thomson, who sought to reconfigure Richards’s concept of a linguistic instrument through her verse practice. Reading her poetry and criticism from the 1970s, the chapter shows how Forrest-Thomson localises the idea of poetry as a unique linguistic instrument in her conception of poetic artifice, which she sees as a form of knowing irreducible to scientific explanation.

Scholarship rarely, if ever, reads Mashreq transregionalism with Algerian literature in French, treating these corpuses as non-conversant at best – and silent enemies at worst. By identifying systems of interacting with texts as interpretive sensibilities, I move away from proper languages as the grounds for a historically troubled comparison. Instead, I investigate differing understandings of polysemy in these two literary systems. Poststructuralist reading methods, which emerged in tandem with Maghrebi literatures after decolonization and remain predominant in academic literary studies, valorize polysemy as a sign of emancipatory reading. In contrast, Mashreq transregionalists associated ambiguities of reading with coercive, state-supported hermeneutics that deprive readers of interpretive autonomy. Drawing on critical essays, calls for print reform, and an interview with Youssef, this chapter outlines a new comparative method for literatures across Maghreb and Mashreq, French and Arabic, founded in plural interpretive sensibilities, or systems of interacting with texts.

This chapter shows how Laura Riding’s poetry was responding to a now-unrecognisable scientific regime of reading that prioritised exactitude over ambiguity. For her, this regime was brought about by the emergence of a new kind of literary critic, one she scathingly referred to as a bureaucratic ‘expert’. In response, her verse aimed to develop a superior form of exactitude, which she hoped would provide a poetics of literal truth. However, this chapter suggests that if Riding’s poetry does evince a truth-content, then it is not in its supposed exactitude but rather in how its artifice demonstrates a thinking precisely in excess of the forms of rational knowing that sought to determine it. In Riding’s own poetry – and this despite her best intentions – it is precisely what she would call its graphic and sonorous ‘freakishness’ that displayed the truth-content of that which scientific modernity consigned to the unknowable. This chapter thus reads Riding as an unchosen path for the history of poetics, one devoted to thinking about poetry’s singular truth-content in an era devoted to scientific specialisation and professionalisation.