The Romantic period encompasses a pivotal set of decades for the development of British citizenship-a fact that has been underemphasized due to narrow definitions of what citizenship entails. Within the wide discursive arena of national identity in Romantic fiction, however, this book examines specific literary tropes and figures emerge that consolidate and challenge the nascent and evolving concept of the British citizen.


Closer attention to the figure of the wanderer or stateless being reveals a mode of national belonging that is increasingly untethered to land and nativity in Romantic-era Britain; tropes of the virtual and disembodiment become central to articulations of political and bureaucratic citizenship in the American revolutionary context; struggles between dependence and independence in sentimental plots of courtship and marriage narrate the citizenly potential of women in the context of couverture; and portrayals of repatriation and exile illuminate how Britain was coming to terms with its population of color in the early post-abolition era. Taken together, the literary case studies in this book intervene in the emergence of a 'Romantic' citizenship discourse in the English-speaking North Atlantic World across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.