1st Edition
Literature and Citizenship in the Age of Revolution A Wish for Air and Liberty
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. 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 understandings of citizenship, this book focuses on how non-citizens, foreigners, and strangers have long been central for citizenship’s coherence. Rather than rootedness, literary texts exposed the circulations of persons, ideas, and emotions at the heart of citizenship. This book brings together an unlikely combination of writers—Olaudah Equiano, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Herman Melville—to shows how literature in the Age of Revolution exposed contradictions in notions of liberty and slavery that impacted how citizenship was conceived and practiced.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. “Where my heart had always been”: Cosmopolitan Citizenship and Religious Community in 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 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
Biography
Mitchell Gauvin is a Canadian scholar that 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 SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English and Linguistics at Johannes-Gutenberg Universität Mainz in Germany (2022-24).
