Foregrounding nationalism: Mary Russell Mitford’s<i>Our Village</i>and the effects of publication context

Abstract

Among the few extant studies of Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village: Sketches of Rural Character and Scenery, most critics agree on two points: for all of its attention to detail and the illusion of realism this generates, Our Village represents only a partial view of its subject matter, and it participated in what can be understood retrospectively as a project of cultural nationalism. These arguments call attention to some of the ideological implications of Mitford’s rural scenes. By focusing solely on the two‐volume anthologies or one‐volume selections published in the late‐nineteenth century, however, they relate to Our Village as a static literary text. Mitford criticism has thus often neglected consideration of the kinds of cultural work that the varying publication formats of Our Village, from discontinuous periodical sketches to biennial volumes, performed. My contention will be that the nationalistic dimensions of Our Village do not inhere solely in the sketches themselves but are, at least in part, the result of publication context. Mitford serves as case study, therefore, of how literary and cultural analysis is always affected by the material instantiations one chooses to examine.