The Birth and the Transformation of the National Tale in the Romantic Age

2014 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 23520277
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Literature in English
• Research Institution: Tohoku University
• Principal Investigator: SUZUKI Mitsuko 東北大学, 国際文化研究科, 名誉教授 (60073318)
• Project Period (FY): 2011-04-28 – 2015-03-31
• Keywords: 国民小説 / 歴史小説 / シドニー・オーエンソン / マライア・エッジワース / サー・ウォルター・スコット / 植民地主義 / 帝国主義 / アイルランド

Outline of Final Research Achievements

The purpose of the present research project is to illustrate how much Irish and Scottish novelists, such as Sydney Owenson, Maria Edgeworth and Sir Walter Scott contributed to the birth and the development of national tales in the Romantic period. National tales depict a colonizing subject traveling through a colonial space, like Ireland, Scotland, and India and falling in love with a colonized subject; the colonized heroine/hero married the colonized hero/heroine, bringing about the conciliatory marriage between colonized and colonizer. Novelists in the Romantic period draw on the conventional use of the journey of discovery plot as a vehicle for expressing their political, and religious opinion. I showed that their national tales provided novelists in the Victorian age with themes, plots, and underlying structures for their novels. I also elucidated that the national tales in the Romantic age exerted a great influence over Charlotte Bronte, Benjamin Disraeli, and Elizabeth Gaskell.

Free Research Field

英米文学