Alter-Nations

Nationalisms, Terror, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland

Amy E. Martin

Table of Contents

“Amy E. Martin’s Alter-Nations: Nationalisms, Terror, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland is a joy to read. It is a book that I do not think it hyperbolic to describe as indispensable, a book that one has long wanted to appear and that should have an immediate and lasting impact both on Irish Studies and on Victorian Studies.” —David Lloyd, professor of English, University of California, Davis

“Amy E. Martin’s scholarship is impressive and the methodology generally appropriate to current scholarship in nineteenth-century English and Irish studies. I predict Alter-Nations will be of great interest in those fields and will further consolidate the connections between it and postcolonial theory.” —Seamus Deane, Keough Professor of Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame

Alter-Nations: Nationalisms, Terror, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland investigates how Victorian cultural production on both sides of the Irish Sea grappled with the complex relationship between British imperial nationalism and Irish anticolonial nationalism. In the process, this study reconceptualizes the history of modern nationhood in Britain and Ireland.

Taking as its archive political theory, polemical prose, novels, political cartoons, memoir, and newspaper writings, Amy E. Martin’s Alter-Nations examines the central place of Irish anticolonial nationalism in Victorian culture and provides a new genealogy of categories such as “nationalism,” “terror,” and “the state.” In texts from Britain and Ireland, we can trace the emergence of new narratives of Irish immigration, racial difference, and Irish violence as central to capitalist national crisis in nineteenth-century Britain. In visual culture and newspaper writing of the 1860s, the modern idea of “terrorism” as irrational and racialized anticolonial violence first comes into being. This new ideology of terrorism finds its counterpart in Victorian theorizations of the modern hegemonic state form, which justify the state’s monopoly of violence by imagining its apparatuses as specifically anti-terrorist. At the same time, Irish Fenian writings articulate anticolonial critique that anticipates the problematics of postcolonial studies and attempts to reimagine in generative and radical ways anticolonialism’s relation to modernity and the state form. By so doing, Alter-Nations argues for the centrality of Irish Studies to Postcolonial and Victorian Studies, and reconceptualizes the boundaries and concerns of those fields.

Amy E. Martin is associate professor of English at Mount Holyoke College.