Troubling synonymies: Britishness and the nineteenth-century novel (Scotland, Sydney Owenson, Sir Walter Scott, Emily Lawless, Edith Anna Oenone Somerville, Martin Ross, George Eliot)

Through an examination of English, Irish, and Scottish novels from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this project considers how nations within the British Empire experienced, and narratively represented themselves in relation to, the supranational identification of Britishness. I define "Britishness" as an inclusive, compound identity that sought to integrate and subordinate diverse nationalities within its imperial rubric. Its inherently composite nature undermined the implicit understanding that Englishness and Britishness were essentially synonymous. At the same time, its claims to heterogeneity enabled non-English nations to contest their subordination through claims to equality within a composite British identity.; All of the texts I consider in this project thus reflect the authorial attempt to navigate what I identify as the contradictory claims of Britishness, non-English national difference, and purported English/British synonymy. Drawing on theories of nationalism, colonialism, post-colonialism, and imperialism, I consider how the novels reflect nineteenth-century thought on identity and nation-formation, as well as the consequences of imperialism on those processes. The two chapters on Irish and Scottish authors, including Sydney Owenson, Sir Walter Scott, Emily Lawless, and Somerville and Ross, consider the ways in which non-English authors sought to promulgate heterogeneous models of Britishness and to reject English claims to cultural and political hegemony. Correspondingly, my consideration of English novels such as North and South, Daniel Deronda, Diana of the Crossways, and Kim highlights English authors' attempts to reconcile nationalist constructions of English/British synonymy with the challenges posed by non-English national difference and the composite nature of Britishness.; Noting the related but conflicting needs of English and non-English national identities with British imperial identity enables us to avoid the tendency to approach British literature from the perspective of "England and its Others." It also relativizes English experience, thereby both resisting claims to English literary or political transparency and requiring of non-English nations a less absolute relationship to Britishness and British imperialism. My conclusion sketches this reading's implications for the modernist tradition and its implications for our historical understandings of the twentieth century.