Recovers a comparative literary history of migration
This collection initiates transnational, transcultural and interdisciplinary conversations about migration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Migrants are by definition liminal, and many have existed historically in the murky spaces between nations, regions or ethnicities. These essays together traverse the globe, revealing the experiences ― real or imagined ― of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century migrants, from dispossessed Native Americans to soldiers in South America, Turkish refugees to Scottish settlers. They explore the aesthetic and rhetorical frameworks used to represent migrant experiences during a time when imperial expansion and technological developments made the fortunes of some migrants and made exiles out of others. These frameworks continue to influence the narratives we tell ourselves about migration today and were crucial in producing a distinctively modern subjectivity in which mobility and rootlessness have become normative.
Key Features
Offers a comparative framework for understanding the modern history of migration and the aesthetics of mobilityForegrounds interdisciplinary debates about belonging, rights, and citizenshipDemonstrates how mobility unsettles the national, cultural, racialized, and gendered frames we often use to organize literary and historical studyBrings together scholars from the US and Europe to explore the connections between migrant experiences and the emergence of modernityEmphasizes the globalism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
JoEllen DeLucia is Professor of English at Central Michigan University. Her publications include A Feminine Enlightenment: British Women Writers and the Philosophy of Progress, 1759-1820 (EUP 2015) and an essay collection, co-edited with Juliet Shields, Migration and Modernities: The State of Statelessness, 1750-1850 (EUP. 2018). She has also just completed a four-volume primary source collection, Gothic Print Culture, 1789-1900 (Routledge, expected 2026), co-edited with Jennifer Camden. In addition to these larger projects, she has published several essays and book chapters on women writers, moral philosophy, and print culture.
Juliet Shields is Professor of English and Kahn Chair in the Humanities at Southern Methodist University. She works on literature of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglophone Atlantic world, with emphases in print culture, diaspora studies, settler colonialism, and women’s writing. Her past books related to the project proposed here include Mary Prince, Slavery, and Print Culture in the Anglophone Atlantic World (2021) and Nation and Migration: the Making of British Atlantic Literature (2016).
