Literature and Citizenship in the Age of Revolution

A Wish for Air and Liberty examines how upheaval and humanitarian crisis provoked literary authors to engage with emergent questions of citizenship and belonging. Playing on the double meaning of "revolution" as both rupture and rotation, this book uncovers how literature both serviced and subverted concepts of citizenship.

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.

Autorentext

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).

Inhalt

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. "Where My Heart Had Always Been": Cosmopolitan Citizenship and Religious Community in Olaudah 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 Herman 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