Revising traditional 'rise of the nation-state' narratives, this collection explores the development of and interactions among various forms of local, national, and transnational identities and affiliations during the long eighteenth century. By treating place as historically contingent and socially constructed, this volume examines how Britons experienced and related to a landscape altered by agricultural and industrial modernization, political and religious reform, migration, and the building of nascent overseas empires. In mapping the literary and cultural geographies of the long eighteenth century, the volume poses three challenges to common critical assumptions about the relationships among genre, place, and periodization. First, it questions the novel’s exclusive hold on the imagining of national communities by examining how poetry, drama, travel-writing, and various forms of prose fiction each negotiated the relationships between the local, national, and global in distinct ways. Second, it demonstrates how viewing the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century through a broadly conceived lens of place brings to the foreground authors typically considered 'minor' when seen through more traditional aesthetic, cultural, or theoretical optics. Finally, it contextualizes Romanticism’s long-standing associations with the local and the particular, suggesting that literary localism did not originate in the Romantic era, but instead emerged from previous literary and cultural explorations of space and place. Taken together, the essays work to displace the nation-state as a central category of literary and cultural analysis in eighteenth-century studies.
Arvustused
'Recommended.' Choice '... the collection's focus remains very closely on the literary throughout - a category which is defined refreshingly broadly, and within which is produced a detailed, nuanced survey of the role of authorial tradition and reading practice.' Romantic Textualities 'This excellent collection of essays contributes to a growing body of critical work that challenges the predominance of the interpretative model of the nation-state ... cumulatively these essays represent an advertisement for the benefits of moving beyond monolithic assumptions about place, such as that of centre and periphery, or local and national, towards more complex understandings of networks between places and between different understandings of place.' Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 'Readers of this collection will come away with provocative new ways of theorizing place and decentering nation, and Dafydd Moore's insightful coda helps connect such models to broader trends in place-based research.' BARS Review
Introduction, Evan Gottlieb, Juliet Shields; Part 1 From Local to
National;
Chapter 1 Really a sweet town: Laying the Scene Locally in
Restoration Drama, Bridget Orr;
Chapter 2 Whats British about The British
Recluse ? The Political Geography of Early Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Juliet
Shields;
Chapter 3 Local Languages: Obscurity and Open Secrets in Scots
Vernacular Poetry, Janet Sorensen;
Chapter 4 At Home in the Churchyard:
Graves, Localism, and Literary Heritage in the Prose Pastoral, Paul Westover;
Part 2 From National to Global;
Chapter 5 No Place Like Home: From Local to
Global (and Back Again) in the Gothic Novel, Evan Gottlieb;
Chapter 6
Resisting the Democratic Spirit: English Catholicism and the Cisalpine
Movement, Scott M. Cleary;
Chapter 7 Connecting Eighteenth-Century India:
Orientalism, Della Cruscanism, and the Translocal Poetics of William and Anna
Maria Jones, James Mulholland; Part 3 Romanticism and the Return to the
Local;
Chapter 8 Usurpt by Cyclops: Rivers, Industry, and Environment in
Eighteenth-Century Poetry, Penny Fielding;
Chapter 9 Local Poetry in the
Midlands: Francis Mundys Needwood Forest and Anna Sewards Lichfield Poems,
JoEllent DeLucia;
Chapter 10 Homes and Haunts: Austens and Mitfords English
Idylls, Deidre Lynch; Knowing Your Place, Dafydd Moore;
Evan Gottlieb is Associate Professor of English at Oregon State University, USA, and Juliet Shields is Associate Professor of English at the University of Washington, USA.
