Dissertation Fellow 2004-05
Michael Tomko
University of Notre Dame
The Catholic Question in British Romantic Literature:
National Identity, History, and Religious Politics, 1791-1829
My dissertation argues that literary and historiographic interventions
in the political campaign to extend civil rights to British Catholics
(often known as the “Catholic Question” or Catholic
emancipation) fundamentally transformed how Britain and its empire
incorporated but also regulated religious minorities. My project
intersects with studies of the romantic period that emphasize the
role of anti-Catholicism in the construction of “Britishness,”
a sense of national identity that united Britain’s domestic
regions and its foreign empire. Recent critics have examined the
struggles over this emerging national ethos among writers from Scotland
and Ireland, nations often viewed as colonies within Britain. Figures
ranging from Edmund Burke to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, however, also
labeled British Catholics a dangerous “imperium in imperio,”
or “nation within the nation.” Examining the intersection
of religious politics and internal colonialism, I argue that the
prospective “return” of British Catholicism and its
“recusant” understanding of national history troubled
both Catholic emancipation’s conservative opponents, such
as William Wordsworth, and its radical proponents, such as Percy
Bysshe Shelley. Even though a form of legal religious tolerance
foundational to the modern liberal state emerged in the 1829 Catholic
Emancipation Act, romantic period literature—especially in
its narration of history—helped to establish unofficial cultural
limits of citizenship and exerted a subtler, but no less powerful,
pressure on religious minorities to conform to “Britishness”
and modernity.
My project draws on postcolonial theory and criticism to explore
the anxieties over the nation-building project in the historical
novels of Walter Scott, the topographic poetry of Wordsworth, and
the visionary poetry of Shelley. Methodologically, I seek to expand
ongoing reassessments of romantic “religious politics”
to consider how genre, poetic form, and narrative structure register
and redirect political and cultural transformations. In its dialogue
between British romanticism and English Catholic cultural history,
my work also examines the ambiguities surrounding history, religion,
and nation in Catholic writers and historians often overshadowed
by the later Victorian “Catholic revival.” Elizabeth
Inchbald, for example, wrote A Simple Story, arguably the
first Catholic novel in English, concurrent with the French Revolution
and the first Catholic Relief Acts. By exploring such foundational
negotiations of national and religious identity, my project extends
the work of postcolonial historians who argue that romanticism’s
progressive or “stadial” models of history still distort
contemporary struggles over religious difference and who attempt
to recover alternative voices on religious minorities and nationality
from the past.
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