1st Edition

National Poetry, Empires and War

By David Aberbach Copyright 2015
380 Pages
by Routledge

380 Pages
by Routledge

380 Pages
by Routledge

Nationalism has given the world a genre of poetry bright with ideals of justice, freedom and the brotherhood of man, but also, at times, burning with humiliation and grievance, hatred and lust for revenge, driving human kind, as the Austrian poet Grillparzer put it, ‘From humanity via nationality to bestiality’. National Poetry, Empires and War considers national poetry, and its glorification... Read more

Introduction: Unacknowledged Legislators: National Poets, Prophets and Revolution  1. National Poetry and the Hebrew Bible: War and the Messianic Age  2. Mythical History in National Poetry  3. European National Poetry, Islam and the Defeat of the Medieval Church  4. Medieval Spanish Hebrew National Poetry  5. Poetry of the British Isles: History, Myth, and Nationalism  6. The Greek War of Independence and Its Poetry  7. National Poetry and Russian-Ottoman Imperial Conflict  8. Byron to D’Annunzio: From Liberalism to Fascism in National Poetry, 1789-1933  9. Walt Whitman, American Nationalism and the Revolutions of 1848-49  10. The Poet as Nation-Builder: Yeats and Bialik  11. Defeat and Independence Struggles in National Poetry  12. The British Empire and Revolutionary National Poetry  Conclusion: National Poetry, Morality and Individual Creativity

Biography

David Aberbach is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, McGill University, Montreal. He has held visiting positions at Oxford, the LSE, UCL, and Harvard. His work bridges the arts and social sciences, as seen in his current book on national poetry and also in previous books, on loss and on charisma.

"Aberbach has given us a remarkable, panoramic view of national poetry and by doing so has fashioned an important area of study wrongly neglected by both scholars of nationalism and literature." -- Steven Grosby, Clemson University, USA