National Airs: The Musical Atmospheres of Romanticism

National Airs is a study of a literary figure, and how that figure appeared in some of the most influential, characteristic, and innovative works of British and French literature produced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The literary figure in question is an acoustic atmosphere in which the resonant sounds express a subversive political ideology. The broad argument of National Airs is that this more raucously subversive air was readily available to many British and French authors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a form of political critique. However, its more specific argumentative aims are to show how several of those authors—Germaine de Staiël, Thomas Moore, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Arthur Sullivan—adopted this oppositional air into their own literary works, drawing on the air’s capacity to sustain dissent to express a critique of imperializing forms power. Their critique follows what has been called “bardic nationalism,” although its investment in an inter-national democratic imagination makes its opposition less overtly defensive than that political ideology, and so might better be understood as an ideological position that this study calls “cosmopolitan nationalism.” What unites the works studied throughout National Airs, then, is the way in which their atmospheres aurally express a cosmopolitan nationalist critique of empire.