Nicholas Birns' latest volume is a marvelously inventive reflection on the 'hyperlocal,' the extensive concept of a place that is at once highly particular and yet massively saturated by everything that exceeds what we often too quickly take to be the parochialism of the local. With a variety of sweeping readings, Birns' book is a welcome contribution to the aesthetics and politics of placement and displacement, knowing and unknowing.

Jacques Khalip, Brown University

In this extraordinary new study, Birns begins from a level of experience and representation that frequently goes unnoticed, and makes it into an occasion for the most unexpected and wide-ranging illuminations. This book’s ambitious temporal, spatial, and generic scope—from Milton to Thoreau, from the Home Counties to Kolkata, from the U.S. Constitution to Wedgwood pottery—is fitting, however, because the hyperlocal itself proves to be simultaneously elastic and incisive, capacious and concentrated. As Birns convincingly demonstrates through a series of inventive, erudite thematic interventions, the hyperlocal is an essential addition to the cache of theoretical concepts we need to make critical sense of our past, present, and increasingly imperiled future.

Evan Gottlieb, Associate Professor of English, Oregon State University; author of Romantic Globalism: British Literature and Modern World Order, 1750-1830

The Hyperlocal offers a suggestive conceit for rethinking the ideological mystification of imperial spaces and a bevy of perspicuous and compelling observations on the phenomenology of space.

Eighteenth-Century Fiction