arin Koehler and Greg Tate are inviting proposals for essays of approximately 9,000 words by scholars at any stage in their career for an edited book, provisionally titled Literature and Multilingualism in the Four Nations, 1800-1900, which builds on the work from the AHRC-funded research network Victorian Literary Languages. The proposed volume aims to examine the intersection between literary culture and multilingualism from a distinctive four-nations perspective. We hope that it will shed new light on the ways in which literature reflected and shaped the relationship between Britain’s indigenous languages; late modern English and its many variants, accents, and dialects; and the foreign languages that were spoken and heard, written and read, and taught and learnt in nineteenth-century England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.
The editors are keen to provide a platform for new and emerging critical voices. Please see below for further details on the topics and approaches. If your research is not captured by the suggested topics but would contribute to the broader aims we identify, please do not hesitate to get in touch. The editors welcome informal inquiries about possible contributions.
To express your interest in contributing an essay, please send your proposal of approximately 400 words to viclitlang@gmail.com by 31 July. We anticipate that full chapters will be due toward the end of summer 2026. Please share this email with anyone in your networks, including graduate students, who may be interested.
1. Literature, Language and National Identity: We are looking for essays that address how nineteenth-century literature in English (and any of its variants), Irish, Gaelic, Scots, or Welsh participated in the linguistic construction of national identity, with emphasis on the relationship between the four constituent nations and ‘Britishness’.
Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to:
- the terminology of national identity, and the relationship – and slippages - between such terms as e.g. England/English, Scottish/Scotland, Welsh/Wales, Ireland/Irish and Britain/British
- literary resistance to, or compliance with, British unionism
- literary manifestations of ‘tributary patriotism’
- literary representations of and reflections on Welsh-English, Gaelic-English, Scots-English, Irish-English bilingualism
- literature’s contributions to the debate about the future of ‘minoritised languages’
- literature’s role in defining the relationship between different languages of the four nations
- literature’s role in disseminating or resisting the terminology of e.g. ‘West Britain’ and ‘North Britain’
- literature’s role in representing and reflecting on the relationship between regions, nations, and union
2. Global Circulation: We are looking for essays that address how literature in English (and any of its variants), Irish, Gaelic, Scots, or Welsh effects or reflects the translocal mobility of the four nations’ languages across the globe, especially – though not exclusively – in imperial and colonial contexts.
Possible approaches include, but are by no means limited to:
- the global circulation and reception of four-nations writing in Welsh, Irish, Gaelic, Scots, or regional Englishes
- literary representations of the presence and significance of four-nations languages in colonial spaces
- literature, including periodicals, in Welsh, Irish, Gaelic, Scots, or English dialect writing published outside the four nations
- literary embodiments or representations of distinctive colonial variants of four-nations languages
- literature as a means of making linguistic community portable
- the imposition of four-nations languages on indigenous populations and/or the relationship between four-nations languages and indigenous languages
Created 13 June 2025
Last modified 13 June 2025