Literature and Citizenship in the Age of Revolution

Mitchell Gauvin is a Canadian scholar who focuses on the intersection between literature and citizenship. Focusing on both the contemporary period and the long eighteenth century, his research approaches citizenship from transnational, transhistorical, and postcolonial perspectives. He holds PhD from York University in Toronto and served as a Social Science and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English and Linguistics at Johannes-Gutenberg Universität Mainz in Germany (2022–24).

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. “Where My Heart Had Always Been”: Cosmopolitan Citizenship and Religious Community in Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative

1.1. “Feeling global”: Equiano’s Cosmopolitan, Sentimental, and Evangelical Politics

1.2. Citizenship in the Ecclesial World: Conversion, Imperialism, and Indigeneity

1.3. Antityrannism, Violent Revolution, and John Milton

2. Authority, Anti-Citizenship, and the State in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park

2.1. Authority, Paternalism, and Sexual Politics

2.2. Austen’s Anti-Citizenship and "State Romanticism"

2.3. Slavery and Despotism in Mansfield Park

3. The Politics of Mobility in Mary Shelley’s Travelogues and Frankenstein

3.1. Travel Restrictions and Passports in Shelley’s Travelogues

3.2. Mobility in Frankenstein

3.3. Irregular Arrivals, Race, and Revolution

4. The Law, Fugitive Slavery, and Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno

4.1. “Sight without Inisght”: The Plot Aboard the San Dominick

4.2. Babo and the Legitimacy of Violence

4.3. The Fugitive Slave

Epilogue

Index