The Architectural Novel

The Construction of National Identities in Nineteenth-Century England and France: William Ainsworth, Victor Hugo, and Alexandre Dumas

Nicola Minott-Ahl

• Publisher: Sussex Academic Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781782847526
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

The formation of European national identities during the nineteenth century through the public's perception of public spaces and monuments – museums, battlefields, war monuments and memorials, landscapes, cityscapes, and the built environment – is a subject of keen interest to scholars in architecture, cultural studies, geography, sociology, history, art history, and environmental studies. This interest is particularly timely given the contemporary struggles in Europe and Great Britain over national identity in the face of immigration, and the economic, religious, and racial tensions it has inspired. The turn toward the meaning of landscape and architecture in the nineteenth century, an era of rapid change and social transition (not to mention revolution), provides lessons from history about how symbols of national identity gain their meaning, and how those meanings change. To date, not enough attention has been paid to the important role played by popular nineteenth-century French and British novelists in defining national identity through their treatment of the Gothic monuments to power: cathedrals, castles, and prisons. Indeed, both Ainsworth and Dumas are underestimated by contemporary literary critics. In assigning meaning to architectural symbols in an age of revolutionary change Nicola Minott-Ahl tackles the vexing problem of historical continuity at a time of profound rupture with the past by considering that "narratives" written in stone did not have fixed meanings, but were floating signifiers for both past and present.