Chapter 9 explores what the transregional system excluded. Algerian novelist al-Tahir Wattar’s novel al-Lāz (The Ace, 1974) was rejected by Mashreq publishers in the 1970s for its purported denigration of the Algerian War of Independence. Refusing the elevation of the war to a sacred origin in Algerian state nationalism, Ace also broke transregional literature’s taboos. In this corpus, Algeria’s revolution is a quasi-mythic zone of noble deeds, honorable men, and utile language. Transregionalism evacuates moral and political ambiguity to secure the war as the ground from which it can narrate the emotional unities of Arab collectives. Ace’s deconstruction of the war as national, founding myth had a domestic target: to unmask what historian Benjamin Stora called the Algerian state’s “faceless” revolution and repopulate the war’s memory with living, disagreeing Algerians. Yet this account of the war also rendered Ace disruptive to transregional circuits and unlikely, in the eyes of publishers, to find a reading market. Wattar’s undisputed prominence in Algerian literature thus contrasts with his marginality in the corpus of transregional Arabic literature and Arabic literary studies. Transgressing the conventions transregional literature erected around Algeria, Ace figures an interpretive sensibility to come, merging thought and emotion to explore new imaginaries of emancipation.

Romantic historicism expressed itself in the narrative representations of the national past, both in fiction (the historical novel) and in nonfiction (Romantic history writing). The rise and decline of the Romantic historical novel is discussed, with its characteristic combination of the past’s exotic allure and its moral relatability, and with special reference to the Scottish tales and the Europe-wide influence of Sir Walter Scott. The techniques of the historical novel in the style of Scott also inspired historians such as Jules Michelet, who began to see history as the collective experiences of national communities and adopted literary techniques of empathy and evocation. From the mid-century the historical novel began its long decline, addressing an increasingly downmarket readership, while historical fields went through a factualist and source-critical turn, away from the Romantic narrativity of the earlier practitioners. However, the Romantic imagination of the past as brought to life by the Scott/Michelet generation remained lastingly dominant outside the historical profession and in the various popular media of cultural memory.

Chapter 4 examines the translation of ancient Greek oratory, focusing on Demosthenes and Aeschines. John Christopherson’s Latin manuscript version of Against Leptines (c. 1544) highlights the force of rhetoric in Tudor warfare and politics. Thomas Wilson’s The … orations of Demosthenes (1570) draws on Demosthenes’ call to arms against Philip II of Macedon to warn against his namesake, Philip II of Spain, presenting Demosthenes as a model for Elizabethan counsellors. Wilson also played a key role in the posthumous publication of a Latin translation of the same speeches by Nicholas Carr to continue the campaign against Philip of Spain, though Carr’s translation had its origins in a manuscript that equates oratory with the political liberty and popular rule of ancient Athens and the Roman republic. John Osborne’s English manuscript translations of Demosthenes’s Against Leptines (1582) and Aeschines’s On the Embassy (1583) apply ancient Greek oratory to the political debate of the Elizabethan House of Commons and give a remarkably positive account of Athenian democracy.

Written in response to the threat of invasion by Catholic France and Spain in the early months of 1539, Richard Morison’s translation of Frontinus’s Strategemata is a paradigmatic example of translation for action in Tudor England. As Henry VIII’s propagandist, Morison used his translation to secure the king’s favour, but the translation is also of a piece with his evangelical fervour to defend the reformed English Church against its Catholic enemies. Morison’s Frontinus is unique in the range of responses surviving from the Tudor period, which reveal that Frontinus’s manual came to be associated with an ideology of Protestant nationalism through Morison’s translation. The chapter examines three readers who related the text to the war with France and Scotland in the mid-1540s and Gabriel Harvey’s marginal annotations to Morison’s Frontinus, which refer to the Spanish Armada of 1588 and reflect the religio-political agenda of military support for the international Protestant cause of his patron, the earl of Leicester.

This chapter reads writings on and in Arabic in the Moroccan avant-garde journals Souffle and Anfās (1966–1971) between national and transregional scales for literature. After 1969, this movement produced itself as a periphery within transregional literature by plugging into literary networks with the Mashreq, particularly Beirut. Contributors experimented with various forms of fuṣḥā – from iconoclastic, futurist poetics to dogmatic Marxist-Leninist prose – to found the written Arabic to express Moroccan literature’s belonging in an unfolding Arab revolution and to shatter the Moroccan monarchy’s monopoly over the language as the sign of permanent, sacred, Arab-Islamic national culture. For Souffles–Anfās, Morocco’s connection to transregionalism lay in the people’s emotional connection to the Arabic language and their Arab nationalist sentiments. This avant-garde movement sought – but never found – a Moroccan poetry to launch into the transregional system. The chapter reads issues of Anfās as transregional literature, Arabic poetics in bilingual Souffles, and translational engagements in French with a future Moroccan Arabic.

This final chapter opens with the universal adoption of the principle of the nation’s right to self-determination, which, applied in the Paris Peace Treaties of 1919, was meant to stabilize international relations and which turned the central tenet of nationalism into a cornerstone of international law. In a European continent purportedly divided into ethnoculturally defined nation-states, the culture of nationalism continued to be operative. Many post-1918 nation-states slid (partly because of an unresolved ambiguity between civic and ethnic definitions of the nation) from parliamentary and constitutional governance towards authoritarianism and dictatorships. Meanwhile, a new cultural medium emerged: cinema. This medium is surveyed to explain the remarkable survival of nationalism across the totalitarian dictatorships and devastating wars of the mid-century, and across the internationalist and anti-totalitarian recoil that dominated the post-1945 decades. It is suggested that this survival, and the renewed contemporary dominance of nationalism as an ideology, is due in large part to its ability to shift back and forth between anodyne and virulent states, latent and salient. The alternation between those states served to proclaim the nation’s charisma both as a merely cultural (unpolitical) feel-good factor and as a political imperative, a commanding, inspiring validator for belligerent heroism.