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.

An innovative account exploring the concepts of 'home' and 'nation' as they developed in Britain between the English Civil War and the Napoleonic Wars. The range of texts and concepts covered by an international team of experts will appeal to a broad spectrum of scholars and students of British literature.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.