National Narrative Quotes

“This isn't to deny that there were fierce arguments, at the time and ever since, about the causes and goals of both the Civil War and the Second World War. But 1861 and 1941 each created a common national narrative (which happened to be the victors' narrative): both wars were about the country's survival and the expansion of the freedoms on which it was founded. Nothing like this consensus has formed around September 11th.... Indeed, the decade since the attacks has destroyed the very possibility of a common national narrative in this country.”
― George Packer

“In both Marriage and Inheritance Ferrier reaffirms national identity differences between Scotland and England by deliberately bifurcating characters and settings between the two nations. Even her very titles - Marriage, Inheritance, Destiny - project a telescoping of the national tale whereby the 'culminating acts of union become frought with unresolved tensions, leading to prolonged courtship complications, to marital crisis, and even to national divorce'. We would do well to reconsider Ferrier's relegation to a lesser novelist working in the shadow of Austen.”
― Charles Snodgrass, The International Companion to the Scottish Novel