Abstract: In the late 18th and 19th centuries, non-English conservatives such as Burke, Scott, and Carlyle, among others, influentially shaped Britain's political attitudes and literary genres because they stressed the conventional, theatrical, and even fetishistic character of civic emotions such as patriotism — and they illuminated the crucial role that irony could play in the construction of nationalism. They represent a public sphere shaped less by natural sentiment or rationality than by equivocal, even ironic deference and a highly conventional suspension of disbelief in the face of political fictions. Burke's counter-revolutionary works present British politics as a theater in which sublime ideas and abstractions are not always convincingly personified. Scott's activities as historical novelist and as antiquarian only thinly reconcile the disparities between the realities of British commercial empire and the sentimental, archaicizing self-image of a nation at war. Carlyle expands the insights of Romantic irony through the trope and eventual doctrine of fetishism: labor that forgets the role it has played in creating the forces that appear to command it.

Keywords: nationalism, irony, Romantic, Britain, patriotism, sentiment, public sphere, Burke, Scott, Carlyle