How Fiction Helps Create a National Identity

· Printing Press: the widespread distribution of particular stories to be shared and known by people who will never meet one another.

· Education Systems and Widespread Literacy: Particular dominant vernaculars and fictional stories taught to children (and adults) who will never meet one another.

· The use of Collective Pronouns: Give reader a sense of belonging and connection to characters and fictional landscapes (Examples: we, our…).

· Characters identifying themselves as a member of a national community (Examples: German, Samoan, Canadian…).

· Interconnected yet Ignorant Characters: Fictional plots in which characters never meet but nonetheless affect each other’s lives. The characters are embedded in firm and stable "societies," and can even walk past each other without knowing each other. Within the story they are, nonetheless, connected.*

· Acts performed by characters in a fictional story can occur simultaneously—at the same clocked, calendrical time—but the characters are unaware of each other. The idea of interconnected people moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time is like the idea of a nation moving steadily down (or up) history.*

· Use of Plurals: Descriptions of things and places in fiction in plurals and as being like each other—typical of this or that society. (Examples: hospitals, prisons, villages, churches, shops…).*

 

*From Benedict Anderson’s
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism