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The book reveals the extent to which writers we call “romantic” venerate and use the classics to serve their own ends in transforming poetry, epic, the novel, mythology, politics, and issues of race, as well as in practicing translation and reshaping models for a literary career and personal life. On both sides of the Atlantic the classics—including the surprising influence of Hebrew, regarded then as a classical language—play a major role in what becomes labeled Romanticism only much later in the nineteenth century. The relation between classic and romantic is not one of opposition but of a subtle and deep interpenetration. Classical texts retain an enduring, but newly transformational presence. While romantic writers regard what they are doing as new, this attitude does not prompt them to abjure lessons of genre, expression, and judgment flowing from classical authors they love. Their view is Janus-faced. Aside from one essay on Coleridge, the volume does not address major canonical British poets. Considerable work on their relation to the classics exists. Writers treated in detail include William Gilpin, Phillis Wheatley, Robert Lowth, Walter Savage Landor, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, James McCune Smith, Herman Melville, S. T. Coleridge, and Edward Gibbon. Four chapters each treat multiple authors from both sides of the Atlantic. Topics include the picturesque, political rhetoric, epic invocation, mythology, imitation, ekphrasis, slavery, feminism, history and historiography, and the innovative influence of ancient Hebrew, especially its poetry.

This book argues that the Seven Years' War (1756–63) produced an intense historical consciousness within British cultural life regarding the boundaries of belonging to community, family and nation. Global warfare prompts a radical re-imagining of the state and the subjectivities of those who inhabit it. Laurence Sterne's distinctive writing provides a remarkable route through the transformations of mid-eighteenth-century British culture. The risks of war generate unexpected freedoms and crises in the making of domestic imperial subjects, which will continue to reverberate in anti-slavery struggles and colonial conflict from America to India. The book concentrates on the period from the 1750s to the 1770s. It explores the work of Johnson, Goldsmith, Walpole, Burke, Scott, Wheatley, Sancho, Smollett, Rousseau, Collier, Smith and Wollstonecraft alongside Sterne's narratives. The book incorporates debates among moral philosophers and philanthropists, examines political tracts, poetry and grammar exercises, and paintings by Kauffman, Hayman and Wright of Derby, tracking the investments in, and resistances to, the cultural work of empire.

This book proposes the mercenary as a meeting point of psychological, national, and ideological issues that connected the severed nations of Britain and America following the American Revolution. When writers treat the figure of the mercenary in literary works, the general issues of incentive, independence, and national service become intertwined with two of the well-known social developments of the period: an increased ability of young people to choose their spouses and the shift from patronage to commercial, market-based support of authorship. While the slave, a traditional focus of transatlantic studies, troubles the rhetoric of liberty through a lack of autonomy and consent, the mercenary raises questions about liberty by embodying its excess. The author argues that the mercenary of popular imagination takes monstrous advantage of modern freedoms by contracting away the ostensibly natural and foundational bonds of civil society. Substantial primary research underpins an argument with suggestive metaphorical and symbolic implications traced through a range of writing by Charles Brockden Brown, Charlotte Smith, Walter Scott, Lord Byron, and James Fenimore Cooper. These writers present mercenary action with unusual complexity and self-awareness, reaching beyond propaganda to explore the problematic nature of the mercenary at the nexus of fighting, writing, and marrying for money.

Walter Scott's startlingly contemporary approach to theories of language and the creative impact of this on his work are explored in this new study, which examines the linguistic diversity and creative playfulness of Scott's fiction, and suggests that an evolving scepticism towards the communicative capacities of language runs throughout his writing. The book re-examines this scepticism in relation to Scottish Enlightenment thought and recent developments in theories of the novel. Structured chronologically, the book covers Scott's output from his early narrative poems until the late, and only recently published, Reliquiae Trotcosienses. Grounded in the scholarship of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, this book covers the well-known as well as often neglected poetry and late fiction, demonstrates Scott's pivotal role in the development of the novel form, and provides a thoroughly modern approach to Scott.