At the core of nationalism, the nation has always been defined and celebrated as a fundamentally cultural community. This pioneering cultural history shows how artists and intellectuals since the days of Napoleon have celebrated and taken inspiration from an idealized nationality, and how this in turn has informed and influenced social and political nationalism. The book brings together telling examples from across the entire European continent, from Dublin and Barcelona to Istanbul and Helsinki, and from cultural fields that include literature, painting, music, sports, world fairs and cinema as well as intellectual history. Charismatic Nations offers unique insights into how the unobtrusive soft power of a culture inspired by the national interacts with nationalism as a hard-edged political agenda. It demonstrates how, thanks to its pervasive cultural and ‘unpolitical’ presence, nationalism can shape-shift between Romantic insurgency and nativist populism. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This chapter reads the Moroccan novelist and theorist Mohammed Berrada’s literary-critical memoir Mithla ṣayf lan yatakarrar (Like a Summer Never to Be Repeated, 1999). A former Souffles contributor, Berrada laments an Arabic in Summer that is recognizable as the emotionally potent, transregional Arabic that propelled the Moroccan avant-garde. Berrada’s memoir, which moves between Egypt and Morocco, ties this Arabic to the Egyptian president and charismatic Arab nationalist leader Gamal ʿAbd al-Nasser’s 1956 Suez speech as the unrepeatable origin of anti-colonial, Arab revolution. In Summer, Arabic was once transregionally alive, but it is lost in the present. Summer makes the narrative of this loss – at once linguistic, political, historical, and emotional – the necessary task of the Arabic novel at the end of the twentieth century. Revisiting themes of gender and corrupted language, Summer expresses nostalgia for Nasser as a benevolent, Arab nationalist strongman and for the emotional experience of decolonization. In its theory of the Arabic novel after Arab nationalism, Berrada’s memoir imagines itself relaying the solitary voice of an author (who also reads transregional Arabic novels about the end of revolution) to his distant, equally isolated Arab reading publics.

In his selections for Tales from Ovid (1995) Hughes includes several incest narratives: 'Myrrha', 'Venus and Adonis (and Atalanta)', 'Pygmalion', and 'Tereus'. In arguing that they, in addition to other 'late' Hughes poems, develop dialogic relationships with Plath's earlier texts, the chapter builds upon Lynda K. Bundtzen's observation that Hughes's Birthday Letters (1998) is centrally informed by Ovid's tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. Analysing the self reflexiveness of aspects of Ovidian narrative, Philip Hardie has commented upon the 'narcissistic and incestuous relationship between author and his book.' The complexities that Hardie outlines in Ovid's relationship with text are extended in the chaoter to consider the relationships of the two poets, Plath and Hughes, with their own and each other's texts. In the process of pursuing this idea across key poems by Plath and Hughes, the chapter further explores ways in which Ovidian mythology is transformed not only through translation but also through its proper and improper relation with other mythologisations and metaphorisations. These range from the Garden of Eden, and different versions of the Underworld, and return us to Shakespeare.

Chapter 3 samples some ancient conversations across language at the interface of literature and lived experience: lifestyle, in the strictest sense. The title nods at antiquity’s most famous Greco-Roman comparativist, Plutarch; but discussion quickly moves on to the Latin prose miscellanist Aulus Gellius. What can we learn if we press the micro-dramas of philological competition characteristic of Gellius’ so-titled Attic Nights for cultural insights into the ‘parallel lives’ of the Greeks and Romans encountered in them? Next comes a matter earlier raised amid the counterfactual vignettes of Chapter 1: what if we had some stories to tell, against the grain of literary history, about a Greek poet responding to something – anything – written in Latin? Virgil’s fame makes his a good case to ponder here; and the Bay of Naples, where Virgil spent much of his life, invites attention as a microclimate of poetic biculturalism. The last section considers a collection of Greek epigrams assembled by a Greek who enjoyed patronage in first-century CE Rome: in the face of most modern critical work on the Greek Anthology, what happens if the Garland of Philip is read as Roman poetry?

Between 1789 and 1815, the nation evolved from a political novelty to a constitutional cornerstone.This chapter summarizes the turning points in that process, through the shifting relations among European monarchies and empires and between those empires and their populations and cultural communities. The ‘ground zero’ of emerging nationalism was not one or another specific country but rather the grinding tectonic fault-lines between empires with conflicted populations along their peripheries: importantly that between the Holy Roman Empire and France, owing to their advanced state of institutionalized literacy and communicative technologies and infrastructures. Amidst these crises and transitions, the nation did not so much wrest power from the monarchical state as gain prestige, charisma and influence within it. When the two came to arm-wrestling, the nation almost invariably lost the battle – but it was never quite annulled as a political force. When Europe’s states were unmade in the constitutional and strategic conflicts between 1789 and 1914, the nation influenced and shaped their remakings. The nation, through a steady flow of appealing and inspiring cultural production, positioned itself as the natural, logical platform for democratic civil rights. Nations gained soft power as states and empires lost their hard power.

This chapter discusses the discovery, in the modernizing of libraries and archives around 1800, of many medieval texts and literary remains. It traces how these discoveries triggered an interest in the medieval period and the rise of historicism: the cultivation of the past and the desire to turn it, and the nation’s ancient roots, into an inspiring contemporary presence. The impact of medievalism and historicism on the culture of nationalism, mainly in literature and in literary history, is surveyed across the nineteenth century. Paradoxically, the scholarly expertise of the philologists was a Europe-wide field, but their commitment was in most cases to their own countries, for which they claimed and appropriated literary heirlooms. The relations between philologists were sometimes collaborative, sometimes competitive, and competition often took the form of international rivalry.