Home and Nation in British Literature from the English to the French Revolutions

A wide-ranging account of the contested intersection between ideas of nationhood and home in British literature between 1640 and 1830.

A. D. Cousins (Edited by), Geoffrey Payne (Edited by)

9781107645493, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 20 December 2018

300 pages
23 x 15.3 x 1.4 cm, 0.4 kg

In a world of conflicting nationalist claims, mass displacements and asylum-seeking, a great many people are looking for 'home' or struggling to establish the 'nation'. These were also important preoccupations between the English and the French revolutions: a period when Britain was first at war within itself, then achieved a confident if precarious equilibrium, and finally seemed to have come once more to the edge of overthrow. In the century and a half between revolution experienced and revolution observed, the impulse to identify or implicitly appropriate home and nation was elemental to British literature. This wide-ranging study by international scholars provides an innovative and thorough account of writings that vigorously contested notions and images of the nation and of private domestic space within it, tracing the larger patterns of debate, while at the same time exploring how particular writers situated themselves within it and gave it shape.

1. Introduction A. D. Cousins and Geoffrey Payne
Part I. The English Revolution and the Interregnum: 2. Nation, nature, and poetics: transitions and claspes in Denham's 'Cooper's Hill' and Cavendish's Poems and Fancies L. E. Semler
3. Home and nation in Andrew Marvell's Bermudas A. D. Cousins
4. Anne Clifford and Samuel Pepys: diaries and homes Helen Wilcox
5. Home and away in the poetry of Andrew Marvell and some of his influences and contemporaries Nigel Smith
Part II. Restoration, Glorious Revolution, and Hanoverian Succession: 6. 'Home to our People': nation and kingship in late seventeenth-century political verse Abigail Williams
7. 'Yet Israel still serves': home and nation in Milton's Samson Agonistes William Walker
8. 'A thing remote': Defoe and the home in the metropolis and New World Geoffrey Payne
9. Pope's homes: London, Windsor Forest, and Twickenham Pat Rogers
10. Samuel Johnson and London Evan Gottlieb
11. Contesting 'home' in eighteenth-century women's verse Catherine Ingrassia
12. Home, homeland and the Gothic David Punter
Part III. Revolution in France, Reaction in Britain: 13. Contesting the homeland: Burke and Wollstonecraft Daniel I. O'Neill
14. Homelands: Blake, Albion, and the French Revolution David Fallon
15. Jane Austen and the modern home Gary Kelly
16. 'All things have a home but one': exile and aspiration, pastoral and political in Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy and Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale' and 'To Autumn' Geoffrey Payne
17. Sir Walter Scott: home, nation, and the denial of revolution Dani Napton
Guide to further reading.

Subject Areas: Napoleonic Wars [HBWH], English Civil War [HBWE], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]