Short biographies of: Raymund Lulli, William Carey, Hannah Marshman, James Wilson, Peter Greig, John Vanderkemp, Alexander Duff ... [et al.]

Literature in a Time of Migration offers a profound rethinking of British fiction in light of the new practices of human mobility that reshaped the nineteenth-century world. Building on the growing critical engagement with globalization in literary studies, it confronts the paradox that at a time when transnational human movement occurred globally on an unprecedented scale, British fiction appeared to turn inward to tell stories of local places that valorized stability and rootedness. In contrast, this book reveals how literary works, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the advent of the New Imperialism, were active components of a culture of colonization and emigration. Fictional texts, as print commodities, were enmeshed in technologies of transport and communication, and innovations in literary form were spurred by the conditions and consequences of human movement. Examining works by Scott, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, and George Eliot, as well as popular contemporaries, Mary Russell Mitford, John Galt, and Thomas Martin Wheeler, this volume demonstrates how literary texts overlap with an agenda set in public discussions of colonial emigration that they also helped to shape. Debates about assisted emigration, 'forced' and 'free' migration, colonization, settlement, and the removal of native peoples, figure in fictions in complex ways. Read alongside writings by emigration theorists, practitioners, and enthusiasts for colonization, fictional texts reveal a powerful and sustained engagement with British migratory practices and their worldwide consequences. Literature in a Time of Migration is a timely reminder of the place and importance of migration within British cultural heritage.

The rise of the modern English nation coincided with England’s increased encounters with other peoples, both at home and abroad. Their cultures and ideas—artistic, religious, political, and philosophical—contributed, in turn, to the composition of England’s own domestic identity. Transnational England sheds light on this exchange through a close investigation of the literatures of the time, from dramas to novels, travel narratives to religious hymns, and poetry to prose, all of which reveal how connections between England and other world communities 1780-1860 simultaneously fostered and challenged the sovereignty of the English nation and the ideological boundaries that constituted it. Featuring essays from distinguished and emergent scholars that will enhance the literary, historical, and cultural knowledge of England's interaction with European, American, Eastern, and Asian nations during a time of increased travel and vast imperial expansion, this volume is valuable reading for academics and students alike.