Inhaltszusammenfassung

Introduction: Linda Colley argues convincingly that the construction of the British ‘patchwork’identity as Protestant, free, and economically and politically advanced in the long eighteenth century is less based on internal homogeneity than contingent and multiple relationships towards ‘internal’ and ‘external’ others. She singles out for closer analysis the fraught relationship between the English and the Scottish and the dominant conflict between the British and the French, which result...Introduction: Linda Colley argues convincingly that the construction of the British ‘patchwork’identity as Protestant, free, and economically and politically advanced in the long eighteenth century is less based on internal homogeneity than contingent and multiple relationships towards ‘internal’ and ‘external’ others. She singles out for closer analysis the fraught relationship between the English and the Scottish and the dominant conflict between the British and the French, which resulted in global wars for supremacy (1996, 5–17 and 122–40). While a residual English nationalism associated the Scots with the French, and the Scots retained a distinct national culture, Miranda Burgess claims, politics, economics, and English as the British vernacular tied the Scots to the imperial Union (88–90). Colley focuses on the impact of the acquisition and loss of the American colonies on the formation of British identity shared by the Scots and the English. She maintains that ‘the second Empire would indeed be emphatically British’ (1996, 153) but does not explore this issue in depth. The current project historicizes landscape painting as a medium of national identity formation in the framework of the relationships between the Scots and the English as British, and the British and India in the late eighteenth century, which Colley neglects.[…] I would argue that British representations of Indian landscapes often function in similarly ambivalent ways, performing ideological work by specific selections, omissions, and combinations of views and motifs, which can express both the desire for ‘the perfected imperial prospect and fractured images of unresolved ambivalence’ (Mitchell, 10). […] The representation of topographical prospects, large panoramas, and travelogues complement each other in the complex construction of British identity in relationship to national identity, race, class, and gender. In the scope of this article, a detailed discussion of picturesque tours of Great Britain is impossible and, in fact, unnecessary, since they have already received enormous coverage, and limits the analysis to a few significant examples.» weiterlesen» einklappen

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DDC Sachgruppe:
Englisch