The Renaissance, English Cultural Nationalism, and Modernism, 1860-1920

Contextualising the emergence of literary and aesthetic modernism and cultural nationalism within the popularity of the Renaissance, this volume offers new insights into high and low culture, as well as historical periodization.

This valuable study offers new insights and contextualization regarding the relation of nationalism to modernism. Hinojosa shows how many writers and critics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, using Renaissance historiography as a model, produced cultural, art, and literary history to promote two often-competing goals: national culture and modernist culture. Reading authors such as Ruskin, Symonds, Arnold, Pater, Fry, Berenson, Hulme, Pound, and Saintsbury alongside relevant archival and periodical literature, Hinojosa reveals the structures of modernist historiography, high and low culture, and historical periodization. This book should interest literary and art historians in modernist, Victorian, Shakespeare, and Renaissance studies, as well as scholars of cultural studies and cultural history.