Shortly after Robinson Crusoe makes his providential landing on the island, he takes stock of his situation and makes a list of the “good” and “evil” aspects of his circumstances. Most of his laments have to do with his complete isolation (or at least his isolation from anything recognizably British); but he also notes that he has no clothes. He reasons, however, that even were he to have them he could hardly wear them for the heat.¹

Of course this sort of reasoning doesn’t go very far with either Crusoe or the reader because the weather isn’t the point: clothes,...

How does language get institutionalized? Johnson’s 1755 A Dictionary of the English Language and his Preface to this project address some of the strategies involved in standardizing language. Embedded in Johnson’s Preface are ideas that reflect his understanding of language as a cultural barometer. Johnson’s invectives against the loose “license” of translators who destroy the integrity of language and his desires to preserve the purity of language by using pre-Restoration writers (the “pure sources of genuine diction”) as authoritative examples for his definitions together demonstrate an interest in keeping English (language) for the English. It is somewhat surprising, then, given...

Johnson’s restoration of authorial space to its proper place is forged by purging the “impurities” he perceives in language. London, for example, articulates with considerable poignancy the problems Johnson identifies with cultural representation. Even while fashioning a space for authorship, Johnson is highly aware of the boundaries that define such spaces and the ways in which these boundaries are hopelessly politicized. Johnson’s use of organizing oppositions like the exotic/external, the urban/rural, and the domestic/internal are not as clearly mapped out as might be expected in an Enlightenment milieu nor are they quite as binary. Rather, the interface between these ostensibly...

At the end of the last chapter I suggested that the boundaries defining romantic authorial subjectivity are contingent on an uneasy domesticity that balances homeopathic xenodochy with the purging effects of xenophobia. How does gender affect this balance? Perhaps it may be more accurate to argue that romantic subjectivity is reproduced within a national frame, and that the act of reproduction itself as a specifically gendered activity secures cultural continuity in contexts where imperial morphologies are continually shifting. Gender, therefore, is decisive to the propagation of ideological structures. But what specific contributions do feminine bodies make to the shaping of...

In this chapter I continue to examine the problems gender poses to ideological configurations of romantic identity by examining two novels. Shelley’s Frankenstein and Brontë’s Villette are narratives that mark the perimeters of feminine domesticity as national affiliation. Both novels demonstrate to varying degrees the ways in which the trajectory of romanticism is domestic. As in the case of De Quincey, Shelley and Brontë coopt foreign ideas of exoticism in order to enrich the native larder; however, unlike De Quincey, they also situate representations of romanticism outside the cultural confines of imperial England.

The extent to which nationalism functions as...

The Oxford English Dictionary identifies the first use of the word “fair” (in England) to refer specifically to lightness of complexion as occurring in 1551 (in T. Wilson’s Logike). The first appearance of Africans in London is generally dated around 1555, “when five Africans arrived to learn English and thereby facilitate trade, as the beginning of a continual black presence in Britain.” There is not a transparent historical connection between these two events. Their proximity, however, does raise other questions: what was the necessity for this addition to the use of “fair’s” earlier meaning of “pleasing form” and what kinds...