SOURCE: “Nations and Novels: Disraeli, George Eliot, and Orientalism,” in Victorian Studies, Vol. 35, No. 3, Spring, 1992, pp. 255-75.

In the following essay, Brantlinger discusses the ways in which George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and Benjamin Disraeli's Young England trilogy employ Orientalist themes to critique English nationalism and racism.

He enlargeth a nation, and straiteneth it again. 

Job 12: 23

Following the Gulf War and recent events in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the question of nationalism has come to the fore in many fields. Is it possible to progress beyond our tragic modern history of warring nations and empires? Can people forge genuinely “liberal” (that is, both just and democratic) institutions free from the trammels of state power and its ideological corollaries of militarism, nationalism, racism, imperialism? Recent work that raises these questions in relation to Victorian culture includes essays in two anthologies—Homi K. Bhabha's Nation and Narration (1990) and...