all but is explored literally, in largely unambiguous
language. In poems such as “Easter 1916,” “To Ire-
land in the Coming Times,” and “The Irish Airman
Foresees his Death,” Yeats is explicit, mourning the
loss of lives in the struggle for independence and
noting the toll that years of oppression have taken
on the Irish character.
While both Irving and Yeats were working with
countries struggling with defining their identities
against the specter of English dominance, in 1897
Bram Stoker’s novel dracuLa addressed the dif-
ficulty of nationalism and England itself. Count
Dracula, whom Stoker portrays as everything that
is foreign to England and the English characters,
seeks to capture Mina, whose purity, intelligence,
and kindness make her a perfect symbol of Victo-
rian womanhood. In contrast, Dracula is mysterious,
speaking in heavily accented English and living in
a remote castle in Transylvania. He is Eastern as
opposed to the very Western Mina, and worst of all,
he is believed to be a vampire, the undead creature
from eastern European folklore. In his quest, Drac-
ula purchases various pieces of real estate around
London so that he may have resting places to protect
him should he be caught outside as the sun rises.
He has transported native soil from his homeland
to deposit in these locations. This represents a kind
of reverse colonialism, with the foreigner imposing
himself upon England during the heyday of Victo-
rian imperialism. The “good” character—that is, the
English—must unite to destroy the foreign menace
and thus save the character of their nation.
Other literary works, such as Salman Rushdie’s
MidniGht’s chiLdren (1983), are openly critical of
nationalist movements, portraying them as dehu-
manizing groups that stress unity over humanity.
In Midnight’s Children, both the Indian nationalist
movement and the Indo-Pakistani War (a nation-
alist-driven war) come very close to destroying the
future of India, all for the advancement of the idea
of a strong, homogenous, modern nation.
Just as nationalism itself is a term that is difficult
to define, literary portrayals of nationalism take
many different forms and approach the subject from
many different angles. Minority groups, dominant
religions and ethnicities, and political entities (both
new and long-established) may all embrace the ide-
ology of nationalism. Literature, with its many layers
of meaning, can express this ideology in support of
all these different groups.
See also Atwood, Margaret: surFacinG;
Fielding, Henry: toM Jones; Forster, E. M.:
passaGe to india, a; Hemingway, Ernest: Fare-
weLL to arMs, a; Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki:
FareweLL to Manzanar; Kipling, Rudyard: kiM;
Machiavelli, Niccolò: prince, the; Naipaul,
V. S.: bend in the river, a; Poe, Edgar Allan:
“Murders in the Rue Morgue, The”; Shake-
speare, William: henry v; Merchant oF venice;
the; Much ado about nothinG.
FURTHER READING
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections
on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed.
London and New York: Verso, 2006.
Corse, Patricia. Nationalism and Literature: The Politics
of Culture in Canada and the United States. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Ignatieff, Michael. Blood and Belonging: Journeys into
the New Nationalism. London: Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux, 1995.
Kohn, Hans, and Craig Calhoun. Nationalism: A Study
in Its Origins and Background. Edison, N.J.: Trans-
action Publishers, 2005.
Smith, Anthony D. Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, His-
tory. London: Polity Press, 2001.
Jennifer McClinton-Templenature
Nature, taken broadly as the earth’s physical phe-
nomena, is omnipresent, in literature as in life. Just
as we do not live and function in a vacuum, liter-
ary events cannot transpire without some type of
space, some sort of environment, however basic or
unconventional it might be. But other than this
initial stipulation that nature pervades all literature,
further universals are difficult to defend. Perhaps the
only other truth ascribable to the role of nature in
literature is that it has demonstrated near-constant
fluidity, from the dawn of English letters to the
contemporary era.
Many early texts utilize nature to describe origin.
North American Indian tribes such as the Iroquois
and the Pima told nature-focused creation stories.nature 73