The national tale

This chapter focuses on the national tale. The designation ʼnational tale’ was first used in the early years of the nineteenth century by Irish and Scottish novelists who sought, in the context of a centralizing British state, to draw attention to the cultural specificity of the worlds represented within their fictions. National tales more generally display a self-reflexive interest in genres that belong to both private and public worlds: biography, letters, diaries, and anecdotes all address a wider culture of politicized emotions that crosses the four nations. To this extent, the national tale builds on developments in eighteenth-century aesthetics pioneered by such Irish and Scottish thinkers as Edmund Burke, David Hume, and Adam Smith, which connected private responses to universal standards. The language used by these theorists to imagine embodied emotions becomes, in the novels, a way of writing about oppressed national cultures.