John Locke asked, “since all things that exist are merely particulars, how come we by general terms?” Essential Scots and the Idea of Unionism in Anglo-Scottish Literature, 1603–1832 tells a story about aesthetics and politics that looks back to the 1603 Union of Crowns and James VI/I’s emigration from Edinburgh to London. Considering the emergence of British unionism alongside the literary rise of both description and “the individual,” Rivka Swenson builds on extant scholarship with original close readings that illuminate the inheritances of 1603, a date of considerable but untraced importance in Anglo-Scottish literary and cultural history whose legacies are still being negotiated today. The 1603 Union of Crowns spurred interest in exploring the aesthetic politics of unionism in relation to an alleged Scottish essence that could be manipulated to resist or support “Britishness,” even as the king’s emigration generated a legacy of gendered representations of traveling Scots and “Scotlands-left-behind.” Discussing writers such as Bacon, Defoe, Smollett, Johnson, Macpherson, Ferrier, and Scott along with lesser-known or forgotten popular authors (and ballads, transparencies, newspapers, joke books, cant dictionaries, political speeches, histories, travel narratives, engravings, material artifacts such as medals and snuffboxes), Essential Scots describes the years 1603 to 1832 as a crucial period in British history. Paradoxically, the political and cultural exploration of ideas about “unionism” in relation to a supposed “essential Scottishness” participated in the increasing prominence of both description and the “individual” in nineteenth-century Scottish literature; Swenson persuasively concludes that essential Scottishness (as both “identity” and symbolism) was refigured to mediate a national synthesis between the emergent individual and the nascent British nation—as well as the naturalized, even de-politicized, literary synthesis of particulars within putatively analogous narrative wholes.

This volume provides a fresh perspective on the ways in which writers have dealt with the relationship between literature and union, especially in Scottish literary contexts. It interrogates, from various angles, the assumption of a binary opposition between organic Scottish values and those supposedly imposed by an overbearing imperial England.

By examining four sentimental travelogues written by British women travelers during the American and French Revolutions, Political Affairs of the Heart argues that this genre, by combining eyewitness authority with the language of sensibility, constitutes a significant site of women's engagement in national and gender politics.

Innovative in its structure and approach, Daniel Defoe in Context contains 42 essays by leading scholars illuminating the life, times, and world of Daniel Defoe. Defoe is one of the most important literary figures in English history, thanks not only to his pioneering novels Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, but also to his notable works in journalism, travel writing, conduct literature, and verse, both satiric and serious. Written with general readers and students in mind, the essays in this volume provide up-to-date knowledge about eighteenth-century literature, culture, and history in a high quality, clearly written, but completely accessible form. Together they demonstrate the ways not only in which Defoe's world shaped his writing, but also in which Defoe's writings profoundly affected his world, and therefore our world.

An instant success in its own time, Daniel Defoe's The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe has for three centuries drawn readers to its archetypal hero, the man surviving alone on an island. This Companion begins by studying the eighteenth-century literary, historical and cultural contexts of Defoe's novel, exploring the reasons for its immense popularity in Britain and in its colonies in America and in the wider European world. Chapters from leading scholars discuss the social, economic and political dimensions of Crusoe's island story before examining the 'after life' of Robinson Crusoe, from the book's multitudinous translations to its cultural migrations and transformations into other media such as film and television. By considering Defoe's seminal work from a variety of critical perspectives, this book provides a full understanding of the perennial fascination with, and the enduring legacy of, both the book and its iconic hero.

The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe is the most comprehensive overview available of the author's life, times, writings, and reception. Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) is a major author in world literature, renowned for a succession of novels including Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and A Journal of the Plague Year, but more famous in his lifetime as a poet, journalist, and political agent. Across his vast oeuvre, which includes books, pamphlets, and periodicals, Defoe commented on virtually every development and issue of his lifetime, a turbulent and transformative period in British and global history. Defoe has proven challenging to position--in some respects he is a traditional and conservative thinker, but in other ways he is a progressive and innovative writer. He therefore benefits from the range of critical appraisals offered in this Handbook. The Handbook ranges from concerns of gender, class, and race to those of politics, religion, and economics. In accessible but learned chapters, contributors explore salient contexts in ways that show how they overlap and intersect, such as in chapters on science, environment, and empire. The Handbook provides both a thorough introduction to Defoe and to early eighteenth-century society, culture, and literature more broadly. Thirty-six chapters by leading literary scholars and historians explore the various genres in which Defoe wrote; the sociocultural contexts that inform his works; his writings on different locales, from the local to the global; and the posthumous reception and creative responses to his works.

This ground-breaking nineteenth-century volume is of considerable scholarly interest as an example of a femino-centric popular novel. Celia in Search of a Husband is a high-spirited and entertaining example of an anti-Jacobin novel, written at the height of the backlash against female intellectuals during the Napoleonic wars. Despite this hostile climate, the author sought to acknowledge the importance of female education and independence whilst at the same time endorsing the traditional Christian teaching that a wife should be subordinate to her husband. Although second wave feminists prioritized the progressive writers with whom they more readily identified, more recent scholarship has rightly paid close attention to conservative or moralist writers such as Miss Byron and recognized how influential they were. Accompanied by extensive editorial commentary, this edition of Celia in Search of a Husband contributes to this scholarship on the literary history of women’s writing, and will be a welcome to those with a particularly interest in women’s writing, satiric novels and spoofs, and Jane Austen.