Melodrama became very popular during the Romantic period, but critics have disparaged it because it was called 'melodrama': that is, a fall from tragedy. Melodrama does not deal with transcendental values or innate conflicts such as can often be seen in Shakespearean tragedies, but, as this paper argues, lack of preoccupation with such issues should be viewed not as its drawback but its strength. Unlike tragedy that is mainly based on the lives of aristocrats, melodrama focuses on topical issues and the lives of underprivileged people. The audience of the Romantic period was less interested in transcendental values than the issues they confronted in their daily lives, and this can explain the popularity of melodrama in the period. Political radicalism brought about by the French Revolution seems to have played a significant role in this transition. A Tale of Mystery, the first melodrama, written by Thomas Holcroft shows how such a work could influence the political consciousness of its audience. Fiametta, a female servant, demands her master Bonamo repent for his wrongdoing and he obeys. She also threatens to quit his service if he continues to be an unjust master. In such ways, melodrama portrays traditional hierarchy to be crumbling, and this could serve as a political message that people should rebel against unjust rulers.

This paper seeks to explain how and why Hannah More chose to model her perfect heroine, Lucilla Stanley, on Milton's Eve in her only published novel, Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1808). The novel was a runaway bestseller in its time despite having no real plot or interesting incidents. Conceived as a work of Evangelical propaganda in the best sense of the word, More sets out to portray a prelapsarian domestic scene dominated by a modern Eve whose primary characteristic is her love of gardening. The extensive allusion to Paradise Lost (1667) throughout the novel invites us to consider why a female author would choose to model her heroine on the figure of Milton's Eve. More seeks to recuperate an older idea of equality based on wholeness and in-dividuality prior to the newer construction of the separate and equal individual of modern liberal thought. The idea of gardening elevates Eve's and Lucilla's status as active agents of God in an unfallen world where there is no distinction between male and female spheres, world and home. The paper suggests that “Milton's bogey” was really no bogey for either Lucilla or her creator, because they are both strong readers capable of reading with and beyond male authors who frame the English canon.

This essay investigates Daniel Defoe's domestic travelogue, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26), with a focus on his deployment of the past and the present. As is well established, A Tour is based on Defoe's firsthand experience with the southern parts of England and Scotland and his incorporation of other existing sources such as William Camden's Britannia. I situate my own reading of A Tour alongside previous studies, focusing particularly on the problematic overlap between what Defoe claims to be his original accounts accumulated over the course of many years (and even a decade) and late seventeenth-century topographical literature such as regional surveys and travel narratives. The problematics I explore hinge on the assumption that A Tour is a semi-fictional narrative, one that is crafted to endorse a particular version of modern nationhood Defoe envisions based on the perpetual motion of British commerce and trade. In this context, Defoe's preoccupation with “decay” and “ruins” provides a telling contrast to the prospect of steady flow of commerce and trade within and outside of the British Isles.

In this interdisciplinary essay, I combine a literary and cultural-studies approach to the study of the relationship between road-making and literature. The enclosure of lands and the construction of turnpikes and canals not only broadened opportunities for travel and navigation but also accelerated the dissemination of commodities of all sorts. These geographical developments expanded familiar notions of place that were framed by the traditional units of parish, estate or even metropolis. Turning to Foucauldian and economic views of the implications of the turnpikes, I argue that the turnpike road system made geography fragmented but simultaneously reshaped fragmented geography into a more organized network of improved roads. Highlighting the impact of the spread of turnpikes and canals in the early eighteenth century material conditions of writing, I aim to contribute to the productive field of the intersection of geography and literature. Through the telling phrase, “the great thoroughfare of the Brain,” Daniel Defoe establishes a sense of place that locates authors within specific circuits of information, particularly within the turnpike road system as the medium and outcome, the precondition and embodiment, of the modern production of space. Crusoe's voyage beyond the island of Juan Fernandez enfolds a return to the present Britain to reconfigure Defoe's sense of the cultural geographies of novel writing.

In her portrayal of the “home” in Persuasion (1817), Jane Austen reconfigures the domestic sphere into a “patriotic domestic sphere,” wherein the characters acquire a national collective consciousness and patriotic virtue within the private sphere of domesticity and family. Austen unfolds the novel's domestic plot within a tightly constructed historical and chronological framework to depict her revisionist presentation of the dialectical relationship between the domestic sphere and the nation. The reconfigured model of home as the new morality responsible for the revival of the nation's true virtue supersedes the prejudice of class and rank as well as the self-interestedness of the newly moneyed class. The patriotic Navy men are given the new domestic role of guardians of home. Meanwhile, domesticity in relation to the nation politicises the moral authority of the domestic woman as the patriotic figure central to both home and nation as exemplified in the figure of Anne Elliot. Though Austen acknowledges the limitations imposed by separate spheres, she also suggests how the boundaries of home might be expanded through physical journeys overseas as exemplified in the extensive travels of Mrs. Croft, enabling the new political model of home that extends outside the nation to the British empire's “home” colonies.

This paper investigates Jonathan Swift's Directions to Servants (1745) in terms of transgressive corporeality. Less studied and little mentioned by Swift scholars, Directions has been understood as a minor work with little coherence. The purpose of this paper is to newly assert that Directions sharply highlights the very dynamics of Swiftian inversion evinced in his poems. “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed” (1731), “The Lady's Dressing Room” (1732), and “The Progress of Beauty” (1720) are all located at the site designated as the “toilet.” The word “toilet” in the early eighteenth century connotes both female space for and activities of dressing and making up, which Swift translates into the processes of defecation and decomposition. The categorization of servants and their daily jobs described in Directions correlates “toilet” activities with the whole household. The presence of servants who blur the divide between private and the public gives rise to an economy of transgression in which grotesque physicality simultaneously serves to establish and erase existing boundaries. The conceptual transfiguration of the body that the eighteenth century witnessed from the communal to the individual, and from the promiscuous to the enclosed, codifies the idea of private spaces within the household, which ultimately stand in opposition to social and physical heterogeneity. Directions not only highlights the rise of divisions within domestic confines but ultimately anticipates the futility of such boundaries. Swift's directives for servants hinges upon the economy of satiric inversion as such, making Directions an integral work of Swiftian parody.