Between the end of the eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth century, several Irish, English and Scottish writers – such as Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, Susan Ferrier, Sydney Morgan, John Galt and Charles Robert Maturin – focused their novels on the nationalistic/cosmopolitan dichotomy. Tellingly, in my view, this dialectics is not simply thematic, but concerns the formal organization of the text, the way a given novel is constructed. Thus, in those years, in the process of definition of a national identity and, consequently, a national literature, certain kinds of writing – variegated, encyclopaedic, non-linear – began to be stigmatized as dangerous projections of antagonist axiologies, not conforming to those parameters of homogeneity, order and rationality regarded as epitomizing the nation state and its symbolic forms. My essay discusses in particular the formal aspects connected to the way nationalism and cosmopolitanism intersect and yet oppose in Charles Robert Maturin’s masterpiece, Melmoth the Wanderer.

THE GOTHIC AS A COSMOPOLITAN LITERARY FORM. THE CASE OF C.R. MATURIN'S "MELMOTH THE WANDERER"

PEPE, PAOLO
2012-01-01

Abstract

Between the end of the eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth century, several Irish, English and Scottish writers – such as Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, Susan Ferrier, Sydney Morgan, John Galt and Charles Robert Maturin – focused their novels on the nationalistic/cosmopolitan dichotomy. Tellingly, in my view, this dialectics is not simply thematic, but concerns the formal organization of the text, the way a given novel is constructed. Thus, in those years, in the process of definition of a national identity and, consequently, a national literature, certain kinds of writing – variegated, encyclopaedic, non-linear – began to be stigmatized as dangerous projections of antagonist axiologies, not conforming to those parameters of homogeneity, order and rationality regarded as epitomizing the nation state and its symbolic forms. My essay discusses in particular the formal aspects connected to the way nationalism and cosmopolitanism intersect and yet oppose in Charles Robert Maturin’s masterpiece, Melmoth the Wanderer.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11389/1493
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