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| | Romanticism On the Net 19 (August 2000) |
 | | National missions were interpreted variously: England's was based on historical and political example, Frances's on a revolutionary political revelation, and Germany's on the civilizing influence of its intellectual, artistic, and cultural achievement. |
 | | This is not exactly a "secularization" of religious prophecy, but a symbolic rather than literal appropriation of it, enabled by the constitutive, performative role of language that could further national identity and engage in a dialectical relationship with history itself. |
 | | Following Coleridge, Perkins argues that the "idea" of the nation is incarnated in particular discourses including law, sovereignty (the monarch both as divinely anointed and as representative of the general will), society, and the relation between church and state. |
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