This chapter examines the ways in which Grand Tour narratives developed through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and contributed to the conception of Europe in that period. It includes Joseph Addison’s Remarks on Several Parts of Italy &c (1705), Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768), and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) and argues that in the later eighteenth century the description of Europe via a part (classical Italy) gives way to an emphasis on the particular. Recent critical attention to slowness, microspection and proximate ethnography in travel writing studies is applied to Grand Tour sentimentalism and satire in order to propose the value of reading such texts as examples of vertical travel. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women’s contributions to Grand Tour writing and discourse rearticulated some of the motifs of stillness and intimacy popularised by earlier writers such as Sterne but introduce new frameworks for thinking about Europe which include its possibilities as a site for shared, familial experience.

This chapter examines consistent patterns and changing trends in British representations of Scandinavia throughout the nineteenth century. It demonstrates how Scandinavia became not only an alternative destination for British travellers but also the source of new literary forms and motifs which inspired and fuelled contemporary debates in British society. Its case studies are Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), Harriet Martineau’s Feats on the Fjord (1841), and Maria Sharpe Pearson’s writings on Ibsen’s work published in the British press (1889–94). These texts demonstrate the growing attraction of the Scandinavian landscape and the so-called cultural (re)discovery of Old Norse literature and mythology as well as Scandinavia’s rising literary reputation from the 1880s onwards thanks to the international impact of realist and naturalist works by Scandinavian authors, notably Henrik Ibsen. Ultimately Scandinavia offered the ‘allure of accessible difference’ as the region was and continues to be perceived as both geographically and culturally close – and yet far away.

The concept of solitude has existed in stories and paintings, and in practice, for centuries. Looking at that history, as we do in this chapter, tells us a lot about the preconceptions we have about solitude today – who it’s for, is it positive or negative (or neither), and how we should undertake it. For better or worse, we also see and relate to solitude in part due to the way our various cultures treat it. The images we see and the stories we hear, both historical and contemporary, create chatter that affect how we think about the role solitude can and should have in our daily lives. Shedding light on biases and beliefs fed by historical narratives can help untangle why we approach solitude the way we do today, both as a society and as individuals.

Feminist ethics, the project of living with gender in all its varieties while also seeking to undo gender-related limitations, seems simultaneously retrograde, repetitive, and utterly necessary. This chapter seeks to make connections among several major feminist philosophers and transgender theorists, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Julia Cooper, Simone de Beauvoir, whose work unfolds these interconnections and differences in ways that also work through the contradictions of wanting to recognize how diverse women are but also not wanting to remain within the complex and constitutive but insufficient cultural definitions of gender.

This chapter reads Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men as staging not merely a political argument with Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, but a political economic one. By exhuming the obscured economic substrata of Burke’s work, Wollstonecraft exposes the injustices of the socio-economic order which he sought to naturalise and attacks the economic order on which late eighteenth-century society was founded. Wollstonecraft shows how Burke weaponises ‘specious’ human feeling in defence of existing structures, and how he defends a political economy which subjugates human feeling to a defence of the status quo. In contrast, Wollstonecraft resists the separation of political economic concerns from questions of liberty, equality, and happiness. By insisting that sympathetic feeling for others should be used to reform human community and to motivate political actions to sustain human happiness, she asserts human feeling as an alternative ground of value.

This chapter explores how political economy was understood in Joseph Johnson’s periodical, the Analytical Review, by investigating which publications were listed under the heading of ‘political economy’, and how they were reviewed. It thereby illuminates how political economy was understood in Wollstonecraft’s intellectual milieu. Political economy emerges as a heterogeneous discourse where political and moral ideas mixed with the economic, and where discussions of human nature, and human motivation, as well as of civil society, were often prominent. Writings reviewed as ‘political economy’ in the Analytical Review reveal how the term was used by radical and progressive thinkers as a means for collecting a range of critical perspectives on contemporary society, as well as setting out possible means of improvement. In the eyes of the Analytical Review, political economy offered the prospect of enacting reforms which might increase the happiness of ordinary people, and a means of critiquing existing injustices.

This chapter addresses Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794), the work in which she engages most explicitly with contemporary political economic thought. Noting that she gives particular prominence to the liberation of the grain trade in the early years of the Revolution, it explores how Wollstonecraft uses the issue to yoke commercial with political forms of liberty. The free circulation of grain was a totemic issue in Adam Smith’s new political economy of ‘natural liberty’, but it also pitted the market against traditional notions of ‘moral economy’. The chapter also explores Wollstonecraft’s links with Girondin politicians, including Jacques Pierre Brissot, and theirs with the Shelburne circle of the 1780s, and discusses the involvement of Americans Joel Barlow and Gilbert Imlay in provisioning the French Republic in the mid-1790s: activity which informed the hostility to commerce of Wollstonecraft’s later works.

This chapter opens with an account of the Bank Restriction Act (1797) as marking a crisis in the British credit system on which the economy depended. It reads Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), as investigating the gendered systems of affect, belief, and credit which underwrote both political economy and social relations. Against Adam Smith’s attempt to regulate potentially disruptive forms of affect, including credulity and sensibility, the ‘extreme credulity’ of Wollstonecraft’s protagonist, Maria, rewrites the usual story of irrational femininity as the binary other to masculine rationality. Demonstrating the mutual imbrication of financial and sexual economies in late eighteenth-century commercial society, Wollstonecraft attempts to mobilise an alternative economy of social feeling to reform a selfish, sexualised world of commerce based on self-interest, and to reformulate the relations between morality and commercial society – between affect and money – by asking what else might circulate to social advantage.

This chapter reads Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men and the Vindication of the Rights of Woman as integral to her critique of the culture, behaviour, psychology, and ‘manners’ of commercial society. Against a narrative of human motivation deeply rooted in political economic discourse, Wollstonecraft associates property with indolence, libertinism, and immorality, and offers an alternative moral economy which links virtue to effort, labour, and exertion in the linked spheres of mind, manners, and morals. The imagination is revealed as posing a fundamental challenge to political economy, as an independent power which frees the self from the subject relations of property order. In calling for a ‘revolution in manners’ addressed especially to women, Wollstonecraft looks to a moral revolution against the forces of history and calls on women to save commercial society from itself, and to save themselves from it.

When Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was first published, it was categorised in Joseph Johnson’s Analytical Review as a work of political economy. The introduction asks what this term meant for Wollstonecraft and her contemporaries, and argues that it was used to understand the nature and operation of modern commercial society, as well as the potential for its reformation. Wollstonecraft’s relation to this project is explored, both through a survey of her engagement with Adam Smith and through her lived experience as an unmarried, often indebted woman in a society organised around possession of property. Wollstonecraft is presented as a writer engaging throughout her career as a critic of the connected material, economic, moral, psychological, and social conditions of modern commercial contemporaneity, and as anticipating the opposition to political economy of later Romantic writers.

This chapter provides an accessible overview of the wide, diverse and ever-expanding field of classical reception studies. It begins with an overview of the word ‘reception’ and its origins in philosophical hermeneutics, and surveys a series of critiques that have been made of the word’s usefulness. Then the chapter makes three claims. First, allusions to antiquity have frequently occurred within a broader matrix of challenge and contestation, and so the critical analysis of classical reception should pay attention to voices that challenge the values accorded to classical literature, as well as those who embrace them. Second, a focus on the history of education can help us see classical allusion as a social challenge rather than simply a submission to prevailing literary or cultural norms. Third, the study of reception is at its most vital as a mode of communication outside classics, whether to the public, to students or to scholars in other fields. Ultimately, reception studies make up a vital part of the future of classical scholarship, and yet questions remain about whether the word ‘reception’ best communicates the subject’s intellectual range and ambition.

This chapter shows how the new demands of a growing market shaped the development of 1790s political novels. In the wake of the French revolution, the proliferation of English fiction began to strike many observers as particularly dangerous – critics feared that novels might be the vehicle of threateningly radical and immoral ideas, while many authors expressed anxieties about where and by whom their works would be read. Examining novels by writers including Eliza Parsons, William Godwin, and Robert Bage, this chapter argues that political ideas across the spectrum were often conceived and expressed as functions of multiplicity: How many readers, how many epistolary voices, how many viewpoints, how many ideological challenges could one novel handle? Focusing first on the proliferation of voices that a long novel allows, and then on concerns about the alarmingly wide and indiscriminate spread of fiction to its readers, this chapter considers how these two ways of thinking about fiction’s function tie narrative style to the decade’s radical political debates.

This chapter argues that the essay begins the eighteenth century as a bourgeois form and ends it as a radical one. Over the course of the century the form and style of periodical essayists such asRichard Steele, Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, and the Earl of Shaftesbury are taken up by writers with revolutionary politics, such as Jonathan Swift, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean-Paul Marat, and Karl Marx.

Mary Wollstonecraft challenges the social disablement of women by promoting a vigorous and curative feminism that establishes women’s qualifications for equality by virtue of their capacities. She associates female weakness with inutility and social degradation and promotes bodily and physical independence as ideals. Misogynistic cultures weaken the bodies and minds of women, Wollstonecraft asserts, and she petitions for women to develop (and be permitted to develop) their physical and intellectual abilities rather than to perpetuate a culture that is focused on the aesthetics of women’s bodies. Significantly, she suggests that it is absurd that weakness is treated as something aesthetically desirable in women. She concludes that society cannot maintain women’s social inutility as an aesthetic, as it is detrimental to social progress. Wollstonecraft’s implied theory of deformity (which links it to moral degradation) is articulated through its acknowledged opposite, beauty. These views are, however, incompatible with the compassion, sympathy, and sensibility Wollstonecraft expresses when considering deformity more directly.

Godwin’s relatively new experience with women following the publication of Political Justice opened him up to a wider range of discursive and deliberative styles and helped lay the ground for his subsequent relationship with Wollstonecraft.In a society of stark gender inequality, it was a relationship in which something like equality was achieved, even if that was painfully won and remained fragile.Following Wollstonecraft’s death, a new set of imperatives faced Godwin which led him into a series of relationships in which he resorted to older and more traditional patterns of communication and with more traditional expectations.For all their egalitarianism, it is clear that class and gender inequality were far more deeply engrained than many of the radicals had assumed.

The 1790s was a decade in which women made extensive contributions to the literary world and in which many of these women took up positions critical of the status quo.This chapter explores the case for seeing the emergence of an intensive set of relationships between those associated with the vanguard of literary exploration and feminism.In particular, the connections between Wollstonecraft, Inchbald, Hays, Alderson, Robinson, Fenwick, Smith and others are explored.Developing the argument of the previous chapter, this argues that the degree of contact and intimacy is not extensive and shows that it becomes so only towards the end of the decade and involving a very narrow group.This chapter also raises the question of how far there is a perception of a group of radical women in elite and loyalist literary culture, and points to the rather undiscriminating character of the references to such a group and to the very limited forms of attack used against those identified as key protagonists.