Romantic Migrations Local, National, and Transnational Dispositions [Hardcover]

Analyzing real, speculative, and imaginary schemes of migration to and from Britain, this book addresses three interrelated movements: between France and Britain after the French Revolution, between Britain and North America also after the Revolution, and between West Africa and Britain in the years leading to the Revolution.Deposing, Disposing, Dispositioning * The French Immersion: Cross Currents of Selfhood * Imagining America * Consuming Africa: Embodying Antithesis

Romantic Migrations is a fascinating study of Romantic period emigrations which addresses the fundamental issue of 'what constitutes physical, mental, moral, and spiritual selfhood in a time of instability and uncertainty?' (147) In doing so, it opens up new vistas for scholarly exploration in the literature of the period, providing a more complicated understanding of the Romantic concern with place, location and self, and restoring a sense of the vibrant and fluid world of travel, exploration, and movement, as well as the enormous dimensions and implications of the voyages of peoples to, and sometimes back to, their places of national and local origin. - The Wordsworth Circle Recovering at least some of the many ways that British Romantics imagined their relations with and to France, America, and Africa, Wiley has produced a scholarly study that opens the way for more 'post-postcolonial' approaches. Such approaches, I believe, should be welcomed by all who value the continued exploration and elucidation of the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century. - Romantic Circles Reviews

Always clear, often elegant, Wiley is a perceptive and persuasive close-reader. He resists easy generalization and provides the kind of unexpected detail that refocuses debate. - Tim Fulford, Professor of English, Nottingham Trent University

Wiley's new study is an excellent and timely addition to that now substantial body of criticism concerned with the global col£‡