in the English Popular Press and the Heterogenization of Nationhood: A Print Cultural Approach to Benedict Anderson’s
explores nation-building via Anderson, Edward William Lane, the popular press and
It's a great read and fills some much-needed gaps in terms of popular renditions of the
Rasoul Aliakbari is a graduate student at The University of Alberta in Comparative Literature.
I. Aims and Scope
This article investigates the popular print culture of the
Arabian Nights1
in nineteenth-century England in order to challenge Benedict Anderson’s
standpoints on modern nation-building in his now-classic
Imagined Communities. There is a growing body of research on the
Nights,
its sources, its literary character, its cultural significance, its
translations, its adaptations, and its continuing popularity in
contemporary cultures throughout the world. Ulrich Marzolph’s website
provides an extensive list of
representative scholarship on various aspects of the
Nights in its various pre-modern, modern, and contemporary contexts (
The Arabian Nights Bibliography). However, reviewing the literature of the
Nights on his website and elsewhere, one notices a relative lack of scholarship on the uses of print editions of the
Nights
to converse with theories of print capitalism and modern
nation-building. Responding to this lacuna, this article mainly aims to
investigate publications of the
Nights for lower-class readers
in nineteenth-century England, in order to offer a heterogenized picture
of the formation of modern English nationhood.
2 In particular, I will explore the print circumstances of Edward Lane’s translation of the
Nights as well as some reproductions of, and responses to, the
Nights in nineteenth-century British cheap popular periodicals, to develop a critical dialogue with Anderson.
3
This dialogue includes revisiting, challenging, and complicating some
dimensions of Anderson’s discourses on print capitalism, the formation
of the modern nation as an imagined community, and official nationalism.
By examining the uses of the
Nights for and among British
lower classes and the expanding bourgeois readership of the time, I will
demonstrate that, unlike Anderson’s conception of nationhood as
homogeneous, steady, and solid, the formation of modern English
nationhood is heterogeneous, porous, borderly, and conditioned at the
intersection of social classes and the oriental literariness of the
Nights. In other words, rather than arguing for the impact of the
Nights
on European literary modernity or nation-building, this essay seeks to
demonstrate some of the uses of this tale collection in the English
enterprise of nation-building, including the dissemination of
‘wholesome’ reading matter and the establishment of British sovereignty
over lower-class and mass readership in England during the nineteenth
century.
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