BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

4. EMPIRE, RACE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN
Theories concerning the connection between national identity and stereotyping largely
derive from attempts to explain nineteenth-century popular fascination with national character
and cultural myth. National stereotypes became part of the cultural mythology of modern Europe
through their supporting role as pillars of an obsession with antiquity or what Mircea Eliade
called “historigraphical anamnesis,” the effort to forge a link with primordial time as if through
the remembrance of a past life. 1 The drive to establish a national identity often led to abuses of
historicism that devolved into fantastic speculations about race and ancient origins, false
comparisons with antiquity and suppositious parallels between contemporaneous events and
great historical dramas, such as the rise and fall of Rome and the barbarian invasions. But this
European-wide phenomenon also stimulated an interest in national folklore. Romantic literature
and popular folk tales enabled communion with the remote past for a much wider audience, and
probably exercised a subtler and more tenacious influence, than didactic treatises on racial
origins or national character.
1 Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Harper Colophon
Books, 1975; originally published, New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 136-38. Eliade states that
Western historiography has substituted “a recollection of all that took place in historical Time” in
place of mythical events that, in more traditional societies, establish a link with primordial time.
In either case the link defines cultural behavior patterns, whether or not believed to be of
supernatural origin.
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