The Epilogue picks up the story that this book begins with, the story of the demolition of the last symbol of Ottoman Sofia’s water culture, the city’s main thermal bath, elaborating on the construction of the modern Bath Square as a showcase of the young Bulgarian nation’s resolve to join the modern world. I argue that the making and imposition of national space in the post-Ottoman period led to the creation of an entirely new place in Sofia’s historic center by the beginning of the 1910s. The modernization of the street network replaced the old naming system that reflected the streets’ natural and social environments with a new one that employed the already large arsenal of national heroes and events. The efforts of urban planners and architects to create Sofia’s image of a capital city of a modern nation-state converged in the project for the construction of Bath Square whose key features would be monumentality and representativeness. The new buildings represented not the environmental characteristics of place but the success of the nation-state and the steadfast pursuit of modernity.

This chapter traces the emergence of Joyce’s aesthetic from Stephen Hero to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, analyzing the development of Stephen Dedalus as would-be artist in the context of Irish colonial experience. It pays particular attention to the influence of Oscar Wilde. Both Wilde’s Picture of Doran Gray and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist belong to the Bildungsroman tradition, that is, to the novel of development, which their narratives challenge and transform by presenting the central character’s growth to maturity as deviating from cultural expectations rather than fulfilling them. Joyce’s narrative, however, points toward a new nation’s emergence.

Was Luigi Cadorna bound to head the Italian army in 1914? For over a century those tracing the Chief of Staff’s rise and fall across the Great War have argued it was highly likely, if not a foregone conclusion. Scion of a dynasty of soldiers serving the Savoys since the eighteenth century, he was in uniform from childhood, and enjoyed an exceptional career. Come the European conflict, Cadorna appeared to have all the qualities of a national condottiero: the brilliant heir to noble warrior stock, to use one of his hagiographers’ formulas. But the most surprising thing about that personal myth is that Cadorna himself firmly believed it. As his confidant and informal biographer at Supreme Command, Colonel Angelo Gatti, would write: ‘he is sure he is the man of God, and the necessary continuer of his father’s work. Raffaele Cadorna took Rome, Luigi Cadorna will take Trento and Trieste.’

This chapter examines the interconnectedness of whiteness, gender, and national identity in Hollywood movies. It begins with Birth of a Nation, Hollywood’s first blockbuster and its original sin. It then turns to films that bookend the Classical era – The Jazz Singer (1927) and The Searchers (1956) – to illustrate how much of the ideology put on screen in Birth of a Nation became profitable subject matter and generic habit in the studio era. It then turns to Rocky (1976), examining the centrality of Hollywood in shaping the racial ideology of colorblindness in the decades after the civil rights movement. The chapter concludes by discussing what the author calls Hollywood’s white racial imaginary, a critical framework that allows for a more adequate diagnosis of the implications of the machinations of whiteness in contemporary Hollywood.

The Introduction explains what East Asia is and how it is defined here: which is culturally, primarily in terms of shared use of the Chinese writing system, shared institutional models, Confucianism, and common forms of Buddhism. It argues that East Asia has changed greatly over time and is internally diverse, but that there are also important commonalities and continuities. The relatively recent origins of some traditions are also discussed. East Asias global importance and continued relevance are emphasized.

This chapter offers an overview of the key thinkers, main concepts, and critical arguments that inform feminist geographers’ work on the relationship between gender and space, and it conveys some principal ways in which this work has been important for literary scholars interested in the interplay between gender and space. I propose that the field’s multidisciplinary theoretical conversations on space and gender have two principal objectives. On the one hand, by revealing how everyday spaces are gendered and queered, they work to dismantle the traditional patriarchal order that governs them. On the other, they adopt intersectional approaches, aiming to expose the relationship between patriarchy and other axes of oppression (racism, classism, ableism, etc.) in a variety of spaces, making visible the complex ways in which marginalized people navigate, negotiate, and subvert oppressive spaces. Feminist geographers thus propose and enable more liberatory gender discourses in order to envision alternative, inclusive spatial configurations of social relations.

The chapter resituates the ideas of empire and nation in relation to the category of space. It delineates the centrality of the concept of space for understanding the imperial and contemporary world-system and the development of colonial capitalist modernity. Drawing on theorists that include but are not limited to Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, Henri Lefebvre, Nikos Poulantzas, Raymond Williams, and Edward Said, the chapter seeks to understand how their works engage with space as a critical concept, and how their theorizations deploy the category of space to illuminate the production of new kinds – and conceptions – of space in colonial capitalist modernity: the metropole and the colony; notions of the core, periphery, and the semiperiphery; and the modern world-system as a concatenation of spaces – that is, a set of contiguous and nominally equal nation-states separated out from each other through the novel spatial form of the border. The chapter also examines theorizations of the nation to underline it as an ideology of space.

In American culture, there is a mix and mismatch of core discourses: religious, Enlightenment, and market economy. Each claims, contributes, and competes for kinds of belonging and national definition, by abstract principles of equality, particular community of religion and nation, and possessive individualism of each one’s own self-interest. Poetry, far from being private reflection or self-referring aesthetic object, is an arena in which each of these discourses encounter each other. Widely circulated in newspapers, magazines, publicly recited, poetry took part in and also refracted, in especially intense and focal ways, the drama, questions, and terms of belonging crucial to, and conflictual in, the unfolding of America. In this chapter, I explore the intercrossing and contention between American discourses of religion, Enlightenment, and individualism in the Abolitionist poetry of Whittier, the poetry of war in Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson, and the poetry of participation in Walt Whitman. In the texts of each, vocabularies, terms, allusion, and critique of American cultural, religious, and political life form complex interchanges, at times through alignment, at times in tense and critical relationship. The poem becomes a field of confrontation, appeal, and address within the context of their writing as voices of culture take on poetic force.

The historical profession emerged in Europe in the nineteenth century in tandem with the rise of the nation-state. Historians of the modern period in particular focused above all on the political history of nation-states and the diplomatic history of relations between them. Global aspects of European history were covered mainly in terms of Europe’s impact on other parts of the world, as in Hobsbawm’s “dual revolution” (the worldwide repercussions of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution), or the history of Europe’s colonial possessions overseas. And yet there were demonstrable global influences on many key developments in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, from the liberalism of the Latin American revolutions of the 1820s to the economic impact of the cotton-growing slave economies of the American South. The globalization processes of the late twentieth century have brought these into sharper focus and powered an approach that places Europe’s history in a broader global context of mutual interaction. Yet the nation-state is not dead, and national governments are vigorously promoting a return to national histories in the service of patriotic education. Global history is here to stay, but its place in the educational system, particularly school curricula, remains heavily contested.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Shakespeare’s plants became the focus of popular printed books. Especially in the post-war period these volumes appear to have fed a thirst for nativist and nationalist consolation. The genre was for many years bound up with the practice – in Britain and America – of planting Shakespeare gardens in civic and public spaces. However, the popular modern culture of Shakespeare’s flowers diverts considerably from the ways in which plants appeared on the Shakespearean stage. In the plays, plants are used to question those social practices assumed to be inherently stable, even part of the natural order: kingship, Englishness, hierarchies of learning, even the very premise that plants (and the people who pick them) as themselves ‘native’. Close attention to Shakespeare’s dramatic use of plants therefore reveals a certain resistance to the very instincts – nationalist and nativist, pastoralist and conservative – for which his plants have been utilised in the last two centuries.

The development of the novel of ideas has at times been closely related to the development of another literary form that emerged out of the social and political transformations of nineteenth-century Britain: the historical novel. With a glance back at a prototype of both forms – the fiction of Sir Walter Scott – this chapter moves on to discuss the work of one of Scott’s unlikeliest yet most significant inheritors, the Scottish socialist and feminist novelist Naomi Mitchison. It argues for Mitchison as one of the foremost twentieth-century practitioners of the historical novel as novel of ideas, focussing on The Bull Calves (1947), which she wrote during the Second World War, and which drew on her own family history as well as the wider history of Scotland’s complicated political status in the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite rising. Mitchison’s most important contribution to the twentieth-century novel of ideas, the chapter concludes, was to forge a new kind of historical fiction which took seriously the dialectical relationship between conceptual and linguistic change.

The national populism of the Brexit movement builds up its political worldview on the basis of an ethnocentric myth of continuous homogeneous British nationhood. This was a construct of the imagination that included nostalgia for lost British empire. It was tightly bound up with the Brexiters’ concept of ‘the people’, which brought into their campaign rhetoric the idea of ‘the will of the people’ and ‘the mandate of the people’, as well as ideas from social contract theory. ‘The will of the people’ was a phrase that ran throughout Brexitspeak, deployed by the ex-Remainer Theresa May and ardent Leavers alike, and backed up by the populist press. Brexitspeakers knew what the people’s will was, by implication at least. And the claim that this ‘will’ gave the government an unquestionable mandate followed automatically, despite the narrow margin by which the Leavers had won, and despite the fact that before it the result had been defined as ‘advisory’ only. There was also the question of who precisely constituted ‘the people’ at the referendum, for there were important groups of potential voters who were excluded by the Brexiter-influenced Referendum Act.

I build upon the earlier discussion – in Chapter 3 – of internal forms of social "tiering" and exclusion to further interrogate the politics of belonging in Gulf monarchies, this time through the employment of foreign labor. I disentangle the ways in which foreign labor plays a role in the shaping and consolidation of the national community, and I distinguish among European "expats," non-GCC Arabs, Asian and African laborers. I argue that labor from the three different categories play similar but also distinct roles in the delineation of national community: While they are differentially incorporated in ways that protect the "nation" and appease the citizen-subject, varying degrees of marginality reflect Gulf society’s perceptions or aspirations of the difference between itself and "the other(s)." Additionally, I examine some of the peculiarities of the importation, organization and incorporation of foreign labor, connect them to the normative tradition, and consider how they serve the ruler’s objective to manage and control society.

This chapter explains the legal and political features of the United Nations. It begins with a short introduction to the UN Charter, which shows the framework of international law that defines, limits and empowers the organisation. It then puts these into a more practical setting, which emphasises how the United Nations is at the same time an actor, a forum and a resource for governments.

The Introduction lays out the theoretical and political stakes of the book. It shows how abolitionist white radicals saw enslavement as a diseased part of the national body that had to be lopped off. Through an exploration of political speeches, cartoons, song-sheets, sermons, fiction, and poetry, the author shows how the amputated bodies of Civil War veterans represented the possibility of a new kind of nation that had Black citizenship at its core.