Francesco Crocco may be an assistant professor of English, but he considers himself as much a historian as a literary scholar.
“Most serious research these days is interdisciplinary and could definitely benefit from collaboration between academic fields,” he says. “The day of reading the text and only the text, divorced from its historical context, is past.”
That view is central to Crocco’s doctoral dissertation, for which he recently received the CUNY Graduate Center’s Alumni and Doctoral Faculty Prize for the Most Distinguished Dissertation of the Year. The title: “National Eyes: Romantic Poetry and the Rise of British Nationalism.” As a recipient of the prize, Crocco has also been granted the Graduate Center’s Publication Subvention Award, which is designed to help subsidize the publication of his dissertation.
The emergence of British nationalism
Crocco’s study analyzes the rise of British nationalism from the first Act of Union in 1707, when Scotland and England joined together to form Great Britain, through the second Act of Union in 1801, which established the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
“Nationalism is typically thought of something that goes back thousands of years,” Crocco says. “But in Britain’s case, it was an invented tradition—an imagined community.”
According to Crocco, Great Britain in the 18th century was “a hodgepodge of disparate and often mutually hostile social classes, ethnicities and cultures, marked by frequent conflict between the English, Welsh, Scots and Irish.” Nonetheless, the idea of a British nationalism took root and flourished, aided and abetted by the Romantic poets—particularly Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Shelley and Byron. What Crocco sought to discover through his dissertation research was how the idea of a British nation state managed to emerge from such a fragmented demographic base.
Just as the work of the Romantic poets themselves helped foster the idea of a unified British nation, so did its later appropriation by what Crocco calls “the cultural milieu of British society.” One way this is reflected is in the omnipresence of Romantic poetry in English-language grammar books, readers and anthologies and its acceptance by critics, both in the poets’ day and later on. “These poets left a big footprint,” Crocco says.
During the period Crocco studied, “Britain was often defined in terms of its difference from others, such as the French, the Catholics or the colonial natives,” he says. “I looked at how the poets of the day grappled with those issues. Coleridge in particular promoted the idea of the British being the ‘new chosen’ people and Protestantism being the true Christianity. In his poem ‘Fears and Solitude,’ he even imagines an invasion by the French.”
The Road to Utopia
Crocco’s interest in the intersection of literature and history will again be reflected this fall when he introduces a new course he has designed on Utopian literature.
“I taught Utopian literature as a summer course at Lehman College three years ago,” he says. “I’m excited about the prospect of reconfiguring it for a 15-week semester.” The course will incorporate appropriate texts and focus on problem solving, “with students assigned to design their own utopias—and addressing different societal challenges, such as the environment and class differences,” he says.
