This chapter considers the literary representation of union by way of three case studies: Jonathan Swift’s ‘The Story of the Injured Lady’ (written 1707, published 1746), Thomas Finn’s ‘The Painter Cut’ (1810), and Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771). Their polemical energy notwithstanding, the allegories of Swift and Finn also display tensions and articulate contradictions typifying the eighteenth century’s figurations of union. These complications may be explained in part as defences against possible prosecution, but they also imply mixed feelings about nationalist commitment, and an awareness of the conceptual or practical incoherence of unitary national identity. Smollett takes such tendencies to their extreme in his masterpiece Humphry Clinker, which juxtaposes multiple conflicting perspectives on union, and plays ironically on the anti-union rhetoric of Fletcher of Saltoun. He fashions the novel, a generation before Scott, as a genre uniquely equipped to address national identity in all its mobility and multiplicity.
literary representation of Ukrainian national identity in the context of the Galician literary borderlands in Mykhaylo Yatskiv’s short prose
