Nationalism before the nation state : literary constructions of inclusion, exclusion, and self-definition (1756-1871) /

This collection of essays takes a different approach to the study of German nationalism: rather than using social and political approaches. the contributors look for manifestations of German nationalism in cultural and literary sources. The treatments take up a range of considerations, from references to a Vaterland in prayer books of the 1760s (and the subsequent debate about whether this referred to a local state or to a larger German "nation"), to attempts to​ define "Germany" comparatively to other cultures, to German-Jewish reflections on the demarcation and degree of inclusiveness of German nationalism, and finally to 19th-century reflections on the relationships of nationalism to conceptions of progress. This reviewer would have welcomed more references to previous historiography on nationalism and community. How might they correlate with discussion of Benedict Anderson's "imagined communities" or of Habermas's "public spheres"? It would also have been useful to evaluate linkages between these expressions of nationalism to larger contexts. Who read them? Do they simply represent their times, or did they also influence later thinking? These reservations aside, the collection persuasively argues for greater use of cultural, literary, and religious sources in nationalism scholarship, and it makes a case for looking for nationalist roots in the pre-revolutionary era. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Roland Spickermann, University of Texas - Permian Basin