This book makes an important and original claim. Yoon-Sun Lee contends that a “Burkean” tradition of non-English British writers both represents and prescribes national ties not as spontaneous bonds to state and nation, but as ironic rhetorical discourse that invites certain performances on the part of their readers. These performances—Edmund Burke's theatrical history, Walter Scott's “antiquarian practice,” and Thomas Carlyle's reading of history as a fetish—allowed these ironists simultaneously to affirm and question submission to authoritarian power, even as revolutionary doctrines threatened British conservatism. As Lee puts it referring to Scott, but in terms her book argues would apply to all three writers, “With ironic tact, Scott promotes the fellowship of incompatible things and unequal entities as though such fellowship were spontaneous rather than calculated, free rather than forced, exuberantly irrational rather than coldly logical—while showing us the logic, the calculation, and the humiliation that have to be disavowed” (24).

All three writers had to confront the centrifugal effects of the passage of time, of obsolescence, on the “shared inheritance” that underpins the nation's unity. All three revised the figure of “inheritance” in a manner that would allow the dynamic changes and accretions of Britain's modernity to subsist with what is, ideologically, an unvarying British possession. Analyzing Reflections on the Revolution in France, as well as a host of Burke's letters and his other writings, Lee observes that Burke opposes to French radical agency a British inheritance in which citizens perform their obedience to power. Burke's famed antirevolutionary rhetoric abounds in studied, not passionate, figural outbursts. Theater for him is both pedagogy and analogy: it both teaches and reflects a kind of complicit allegiance. Members of the public, “both audience and actor,” perform their loyalty even as they ironically discount “compromising knowledge” of their subaltern submission (64). Similarly, Scott, writing both as novelist in The Antiquary and as tourist collecting the artifacts of the Battle of Waterloo in Paul's Letters to his Kinsfolk, reflects an awareness of the askew relation that the antiquary has to official nationalism. Unlike “patriotic traditionalism,” which portrayed “the nation as undivided and self-inheriting,” antiquarian practice highlights both the passage of time and the “processes of obsolescence and fragmentation” (77). Carlyle also, whether reflecting on the French Revolution or analyzing the internal threat to national unity of the stark incommensurability of wealth and labor, turns to cultural artifacts that would simultaneously revivify the past and discount the importance of time's passage. In Past and Present, Lee explains, Carlyle turns to the reading of history as a salvatory practice that would absorb the reader in the nation's past, erasing his present occupation with divisive self-interest. Carlyle's peculiar mixture of radical and reactionary ideas answers the anxieties of a time when, following the industrial revolution, material production and work came to figure in political claims. The type of reading that Carlyle prescribes sets the text—or rather the reader's own work of absorption and self-effacement—as a fetish, a self-made object of reverence that would compensate for British society's material inequalities. Carlyle, explicitly drawing on Mungo Park's Travels in the Interior District of Africa, links Britain's regeneration to its empire, in which the “Black African” prays with “awe-struck eye” (130–31) to a fetish of his own making.

Its good introductory chapter—which sets “Romantic irony” within a comparative European context, analyzing writings by Benjamin Constant and Friedrich Schlegel—notwithstanding, this book would have benefited from a more thorough genealogy of irony's relation to European political discourse. Lee's use of Michael Fried's important “absorption” paradigm—which Fried develops reading Diderot's art criticism—to characterize Carlyle's reading of history occasionally short-circuits contemporary genealogies of irony's relation to political feelings—Rousseau's agonized struggle for sincerity, for instance. Within the French context, it is important to remember, nationalist rhetoric set its own sincerity against aristocratic wit. Its irony, therefore, had to tread lightly. Were there similar British contexts? Lee herself recognizes irony's historicity when she pithily sums up her argument: “One of Romantic nationalism's achievements was the rediscovery of irony's civic potential. Inheriting an earlier tradition of Tory satire … important non-English conservatives like Edmund Burke, Walter Scott, and Thomas Carlyle explored irony's capacious address” (5). Nationalism and Irony, though thoroughly convincing, would have immensely benefited from a discussion of how these Romantic ironists updated their great Tory predecessors. Such a discussion would lend more depth to the French parallel counterexample.

Lee also needs a concluding chapter in which the book's terms of art would have been highlighted. The notion of obsolescence, which, as this review has stated, lies at heart of the three writers’ ironic representations of nationalism, is not developed in the depth it deserves. More work, furthermore, is needed to establish that these three writers constitute a tradition. Lee contends that their brand of nationalism “allied with irony could speak to those left unmoved by ideologies that took for granted spontaneous, deep attachment” (5). This might be arguable, but Lee's book offers no evidence of this ironic nationalism's reception. Was this to be a “thinking man’s” nationalism unfit for the mob? Lee's book does not consider the dialectic between the high literary rhetorical discourses she analyzes and popular representations of nationalism. It seems to me that accepting that popular nationalism was unironic might undervalue the irony inherent in critical popular practices such as caricaturing political leaders and newspaper reporting on Britain's interminable wars.