Within the wide discursive arena of national identity in Romantic fiction, this book examines specific literary tropes and figures that consolidate and challenge the nascent, evolving concept of the British citizen.
Alison Cotti-Lowell attends to the figure of the wanderer in the National Tale to reveal a mode of national belonging that was increasingly untethered to land, genealogy, and nativity in Romantic Britain. Across the Atlantic, the author surveys how tropes of the "virtual" and disembodiment became central to burgeoning articulations of proto-bureaucratic citizenship in the Anglo-American revolutionary context. The author analyzes sentimental novels of courtship and marriage in which struggles between dependence and independence reveal the citizenly potential of women living in Britain under the strictures and structures of couverture. Through close literary-critical interpretation, this book connects Romantic fiction to matters of nationalism, individual subject formation, and bureaucracy to reveal how forms of citizenship and the citizenly subject were forged in literary form and discourse with close ties to the gothic register, across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the English-speaking North Atlantic World.