This volume contains primary materials and introductory essays on the historical, critical and theoretical study of "national literature," focusing on the years 1550 ? 1850 and the impact of ideas of nationhood from this period on contemporary literature and culture.

The book is helpfully divided into three comprehensive parts. Part One contains a selection of primary materials from various English-speaking nations, written between the early modern and the early Victorian eras. These include political essays, poetry, religious writing, and literary theory by major authors and thinkers ranging from Edmund Spenser, Anne Bradstreet and David Hume to Adam Kidd and Peter Du Ponceau. Parts Two and Three contain critical essays by leading scholars in the field: Part Two introduces and contextualizes the primary material and Part Three brings the discussion up-to-date by discussing its impact on contemporary issues such as canon-formation and globalization.

The volume is prefaced by an extensive introduction to and overview of recent studies in nationalism, the history and debates of nationalism through major literary periods and discussion of why the question of nationhood is important.

Reading the Nation in English is a comprehensive resource, offering coherent, accessible readings on the ideologies, discourses and practices of nationhood.

Contributors: Terence N. Bowers, Andrea Cabajsky, Sarah Corse, Andrew Escobedo, Andrew Hadfield, Deborah Madsen, Elizabeth Sauer, Imre Szeman, Julia M. Wright.

Exploring the ways in which transatlantic relationships functioned in the nineteenth century to unsettle hierarchical models of gender, race, and national and cultural differences, this collection demonstrates the generative potential of transatlantic studies to loosen demographic frames and challenge conveniently linear histories. The contributors take up a rich and varied range of topics, including Charlotte Smith's novelistic treatment of the American Revolution, The Old Manor House; Anna Jameson's counter-discursive constructions of gender in a travelogue; Felicia Hemans, Herman Melville, and the 'Queer Atlantic'; representations of indigenous religion and shamanism in British Romantic literary discourse; the mid-nineteenth-century transatlantic abolitionist movement; the transatlantic adventure novel; the exchanges of transatlantic print culture facilitated by the Minerva Press; British and Anglo-American representations of Niagara Falls; and Charles Brockden Brown's intervention in the literature of exploration. Taken together, the essays underscore the strategic power of the concept of the transatlantic to enable new perspectives on the politics of gender, race, and cultural difference as manifested in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and North America.

Romanticism has often been associated with lyric poetry, or otherwise confined within mainstream genres. As a result, we have neglected the sheer diversity and generic hybridity of a literature that ranged from the Gothic novel to the national tale, from monthly periodicals to fictionalized autobiography. In this new volume some of the leading scholars of the period explore the relationship between ideology and literary genre from a variety of theoretical perspectives. The introduction offers a fresh examination of how genre was rethought by Romantic criticism.

In this innovative study Julia M. Wright addresses rarely asked questions: how and why does one colonized nation write about another? Wright focuses on the way nineteenth-century Irish writers wrote about India, showing how their own experience of colonial subjection and unfulfilled national aspirations informed their work. Their writings express sympathy with the colonised or oppressed people of India in order to unsettle nineteenth-century imperialist stereotypes, and demonstrate their own opposition to the idea and reality of empire. Drawing on Enlightenment philosophy, studies of nationalism, and postcolonial theory, Wright examines fiction by Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan, gothic tales by Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde, poetry by Thomas Moore and others, as well as a wide array of non-fiction prose. In doing so she opens up new avenues in Irish studies and nineteenth-century literature.

In this innovative study Julia M. Wright addresses rarely asked questions: how and why does one colonized nation write about another? Wright focuses on the way nineteenth-century Irish writers wrote about India, showing how their own experience of colonial subjection and unfulfilled national aspirations informed their work. Their writings express sympathy with the colonised or oppressed people of India in order to unsettle nineteenth-century imperialist stereotypes, and demonstrate their own opposition to the idea and reality of empire. Drawing on Enlightenment philosophy, studies of nationalism, and postcolonial theory, Wright examines fiction by Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan, gothic tales by Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde, poetry by Thomas Moore and others, as well as a wide array of non-fiction prose. In doing so she opens up new avenues in Irish studies and nineteenth-century literature.

Romanticism has often been associated with the mode of lyric, or otherwise confined within mainstream genres. As a result, we have neglected the sheer diversity and generic hybridity of a literature that ranged from the Gothic novel to the national tale, from monthly periodicals to fictionalized autobiography. In this volume leading scholars of the period explore the ways in which the Romantics developed genre from a taxonomical given into a cultural category, so as to make it the scene of an ongoing struggle between fixed norms and new initiatives. Focusing on non-canonical writers (such as Thelwall, Godwin and the novelists of the 1790s), or placing authors such as Wordsworth and Byron in a non-canonical context, these essays explore the psychic and social politics of genre from a variety of theoretical perspectives, while the introduction looks at how genre itself was rethought by Romantic criticism.

This volume contains primary materials and introductory essays on the historical, critical and theoretical study of "national literature", focusing on the years 1550 - 1850 and the impact of ideas of nationhood from this period on contemporary literature and culture. The book is helpfully divided into three comprehensive parts. Part One contains a selection of primary materials from various English-speaking nations, written between the early modern and the early Victorian eras. These include political essays, poetry, religious writing, and literary theory by major authors and thinkers ranging from Edmund Spenser, Anne Bradstreet and David Hume to Adam Kidd and Peter Du Ponceau. Parts Two and Three contain critical essays by leading scholars in the field: Part Two introduces and contextualizes the primary material and Part Three brings the discussion up-to-date by discussing its impact on contemporary issues such as canon-formation and globalization. The volume is prefaced by an extensive introduction to and overview of recent studies in nationalism, the history and debates of nationalism through major literary periods and discussion of why the question of nationhood is important. Reading the Nation in English is a comprehensive resource, offering coherent, accessible readings on the ideologies, discourses and practices of nationhood. Contributors: Terence N. Bowers, Andrea Cabajsky, Sarah Corse, Andrew Escobedo, Andrew Hadfield, Deborah Madsen, Elizabeth Sauer, Imre Szeman, Julia M. Wright.

Ever since Michel Foucault's highly regarded work on prisons and confinement in the 1970s, critical examination of the forerunners to the prison - slavery, serfdom, and colonial confinements - has been rare. However, these institutions inform and participate in many of the same ideologies that the prison enforces. Captivating Subjects is a collection of essays that fills several crucial gaps in the critical examination of the relations between Western state-sanctioned confinement, identity, nation, and literature. Editors Jason Haslam and Julia M. Wright have brought together an esteemed group of international scholars to examine nineteenth-century writings by prisoners, slaves, and other captives, tracing some of the continuities among the varieties of captivity and their crucial relationship to post-Enlightenment subjectivities. This volume is the first sustained examination of the ways in which the diverse kinds of confinement intersect with Western ideologies of subjectivity, investigating the modern nation-state's reliance on captivity as a means of consolidating notions of individual and national sovereignty. It details the specific historical and cultural practices of confinement and their relations to each other and to punishment through a range of national contexts.

Ever since Michel Foucault's highly regarded work on prisons and confinement in the 1970s, critical examination of the forerunners to the prison - slavery, serfdom, and colonial confinements - has been rare. However, these institutions inform and participate in many of the same ideologies that the prison enforces. Captivating Subjects is a collection of essays that fills several crucial gaps in the critical examination of the relations between Western state-sanctioned confinement, identity, nation, and literature. Editors Jason Haslam and Julia M. Wright have brought together an esteemed group of international scholars to examine nineteenth-century writings by prisoners, slaves, and other captives, tracing some of the continuities among the varieties of captivity and their crucial relationship to post-Enlightenment subjectivities. This volume is the first sustained examination of the ways in which the diverse kinds of confinement intersect with Western ideologies of subjectivity, investigating the modern nation-state's reliance on captivity as a means of consolidating notions of individual and national sovereignty. It details the specific historical and cultural practices of confinement and their relations to each other and to punishment through a range of national contexts.

William Blake's reputation as a staunch individualist is based in large measure on his repeated attacks on institutions and belief systems that constrain the individual's imagination. Blake, however, rarely represents isolation positively, suggesting that the individual's absolute freedom from communal pressures is not the ideal. Instead, as Julia Wright argues in her award-winning study Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation, Blake's concern lies with the kind of community that is being established. Moreover, writing at the moment of the emergence of modern nationalism, Blake reveals a concern with the national community in particular. Beginning with a discussion of the priority of national narrative in late-eighteenth-century art theory and antiquarianism, Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation traces its relevance in Blake's printed works, from The Poetical Sketches and the Lambeth Prophecies to The Laocooen. Professor Wright then turns to Europe, America, and Visions of the Daughters of Albion, focusing on Blake's portrayals of particular characters' alienation from the groups and ideologies represented in the texts. The book closes by arguing that Blake's major printed works, Milton and Jerusalem, are explicit and extensive engagements with the question of nation--and empire. Although nationalism existed in various forms during the Romantic period, Blake's contemporaries generally assumed that nations should progress continuously, producing a clear narrative line from an auspicious origin to the perfect fulfillment of that promise. Wright argues that these mutually determining constructs of national character and national narrative inform Blake's handling of the problem of the individual-within-a-community.

"Nervous Reactions considers Victorian responses to Romanticism, particularly the way in which the Romantic period was frequently constructed in Victorian-era texts as a time of nervous or excitable authors(and readers) at odds with Victorian values of self-restraint, moderation, and stolidity. Represented in various ways--as a threat to social order, as a desirable freedom of feeling, as a pathological weakness that must be cured--this nervousness, both about and of the Romantics, is an important though as yet unaddressed concern in Victorian responses to Romantic texts. By attending to this nervousness, the essays in this volume offer a new consideration not only of the relationship between the Victorian and Romantic periods, but also of the ways in which our own responses to Romanticism have been mediated by this Victorian attention to Romantic excitability. Considering editions and biographies as well as literary and critical responses to Romantic writers, the volume addresses a variety of discursive modes and genres, and brings to light a number of authors not normally included in the longstanding category of "Victorian Romanticism": on the Romantic side, not just Wordsworth, Keats, and P. B. Shelley but also Byron, S.T. Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, Mary Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft; and on the Victorian side, not just Thomas Carlyle and the Brownings but also Sara Coleridge, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Archibald Lampman, and J. S. Mill.