Romantic Englishness

Romantic Englishness investigates how narratives of localised selfhood in English Romantic writing are produced in relation to national and transnational formations. Focusing on autobiographical texts by a wide range of authors -- including Thomas Bewick, John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Cowper, Thomas De Quincey, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, and William Wordsworth -- this book sheds new light on the construction of national identity in the period and argues for the persistence of specifically English forms of selfhood. It not only shows how Englishness was often understood to be embodied in particular rural or occasionally urban locales, but also that Romantic writers understood these locales to be inflected by imperialism and colonialism. It therefore complicates existing critical understanding of 'Romantic ecology' by revealing the ambiguous role of place in Romantic literature--Provided by publisher.