Overview

Citizenship is at the forefront of popular imagination as political movements and state governments around the world traffic in anti-immigrant rhetoric and call for increased policing of borders. Literature and Citizenship in the Age of Revolution: A Wish for Air and Liberty looks back to a critical historical juncture in the development of citizenship to uncover how literature contoured and contested imaginings of citizenship. While territory and the nation-state often frame our understanding of citizenship, this book focuses on how non-citizens, foreigners, and strangers have long been central to citizenship’s coherence. Rather than rootedness, literary texts exposed the circulations of persons, ideas, and affections at the heart of citizenship. This book brings together an unlikely combination of writers—Olaudah Equiano, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Herman Melville—to show how literature in the Age of Revolution exposed contradictions in notions of liberty and slavery that impacted how citizenship was conceived and practiced.

Full Product Details

Author:   Mitchell Gauvin
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
Weight:   0.453kg
ISBN:  

9781032794815

ISBN 10:   103279481
Pages:   218
Publication Date:   11 September 2024
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction 1. “Where my heart had always been”: Cosmopolitan Citizenship and Religious Community in Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative 1.1. “Feeling global”: Equiano’s Cosmopolitan, Sentimental, and Evangelical Politics 1.2. Citizenship in the Ecclesial World: Conversion, Imperialism, and Indigeneity 1.3. Antityrannism, Violent Revolution, and John Milton 2. Authority, Anti-Citizenship, and the State in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park 2.1. Authority, Paternalism, and Sexual Politics 2.2. Austen’s Anti-citizenship and ‘State Romanticism’ 2.3. Slavery and Despotism in Mansfield Park 3. The Politics of Mobility in Mary Shelley’s travelogues and Frankenstein 3.1. Travel Restrictions and Passports in Shelley’s Travelogues 3.2. Mobility in Frankenstein 3.3. Irregular Arrivals, Race, and Revolution 4. The Law, Fugitive Slavery, and Melville’s Benito Cereno 4.1. “Sight without inisght”: The Plot Aboard the San Dominick 4.2. Babo and the Legitimacy of Violence 4.3. The Fugitive Slave Epilogue Index

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Author Information

Mitchell Gauvin is a Canadian scholar who focuses on the intersection between literature and citizenship. Focusing on both the contemporary period and the long eighteenth century, his research approaches citizenship from transnational, transhistorical, and postcolonial perspectives. He holds PhD from York University in Toronto and served as a Social Science and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English and Linguistics at Johannes-Gutenberg Universität Mainz in Germany (2022–24).

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