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

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.

A. D. Cousins is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a Member of the Order of Australia. He has published thirteen books in America and England, including monographs on Thomas More, Shakespeare's non-dramatic verse, and religious verse of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is on the Editorial Board of Moreana, the international journal of More and Erasmus studies, and of the Journal of Language, Literature and Culture (JLLC) (formerly AUMLA).
Geoffrey Payne is Lecturer in the Department of English at Macquarie University, Australia. He served as treasurer for the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association from 2008 to 2013 and was Managing Editor of their journal (AUMLA) between 2008 and 2011. His first book, Dark Imaginings: Ideology and Darkness in the Poetry of Lord Byron, was published in 2008.