This paper discusses John Polidori's Vampyre: a Tale in the context of the advent of modern authorship and the establishment of copyright protection law. The first section looks into the author's continuous attempts to claim sole ownership of the work and analyzes them within the discourse of Lockean possessive individualism. The second and third sections draw attention to Polidori's elusive gestures that contradict his own ownership claim and link them to characteristics of contemporary gothic novels. It is believed that the Romantic notion of authorship that emphasized the author's unique personal contribution to the work nurtured a particular legal model of copyright protection that prioritizes dematerialized qualities such as originality and creativity. Caught up between seemingly discrepant desires in his claim to ownership of Vampyre, Polidori highlights the unresolved contradictions inherent in the early notion of modern authorship and intellectual property.

This paper examines Wordsworth's idea of patriotism in his Concerning The Convention of Cintra (1809) in the context of the political debate between Richard Price and Edmund Burke over the nature of patriotism. I survey the idea of patriot from its Greco-Roman etymology to its various usages in 18th-century Britain before comparing Price's idea of cosmopolitan patriotism based on “universal benevolence” with Burke's “chivalric” patriotism based on filial love and regional loyalty. I then turn to Coleridge's idea of “modern patriotism,” which illuminates the cosmopolitan aspects of Wordsworth's patriotism in the early 1790s. A passage in Wordsworth's The Prelude (1805) agonizingly recollects the moment of moral dilemma in 1793 when he heard the news of the debacle of the British army. His use of Burkean expressions such as “this most unnatural strife” and “the blessed tree of my beloved country” clearly indicate that his cosmopolitan patriotism was seriously weakened in the aftermath of Napoleon's coronation in 1804. This position, however, was decisively reversed four years later in his Concerning The Convention of Cintra where he reaffirms his republican sympathy in his enthusiastic support for the Spanish-Portuguese people's brave resistance to the invading Napoleonic army, reclaiming the cosmopolitan patriotism he had begun to lose sight of when he began to be disillusioned with the French Revolution.

This essay explores the significations of “Nature” as it is observed, represented, and interpreted by Gilbert White, an eighteenth-century field-naturalist and curate of Selborne, Hampshire, England, in his best-selling epistolary narrative, The Natural History and Antiquity of Selborne (1789). White's work helped shape the way we perceive, observe, and record Nature through our independent and individual “eye.” Alternating between two contrastive, if not contrasting, conceptions of Nature as God's creation and objective material entity, White oscillates between the positions of naturalist and writer, between observer and active reader of the “Book of Nature,” and between anti-romantic recorder of facts and imaginative artist. The essay explores the enduring legacy of White's work and his importance as a regionalist who seemed to have cosmopolitan concerns as well. White explores different meanings of Nature in his observations of the swallow and his reading of the “natural economy,” reflecting his ambiguous position as both reader and writer of the Book of Nature.

During the French Revolution, letters played a crucial role in the debate on the Revolution among the English. This paper discusses the ways in which author Charlotte Smith engages in fictional epistolary narrative to participate in the debate through her novel Desmond (1792). Writing epistolary fiction was a new and challenging experience for her, as expressed in her concerns in the preface to Desmond. However, she ably employs letters in different ways to describe English society, where misrepresentations of the Revolution were widespread. While showing two conflicting points of view, either within a single letter or among multiple letters, she portrays letters as a means of delivering truth as well as an obstacle to reaching truth. She represents her trustworthy narrator Lionel Desmond as a person capable of hiding the truth, placing her readers in a state of uncertainty. By examining these diverse rhetorical strategies of the letter form and by tracing the shifting of Desmond's narrative authority, this paper shows the ways in which Smith encourages her readers to cast doubt on the genuineness of the information presented, as well as the necessity for challenging all information that is presented as truth.

This paper aims to study the sociopolitical background of the rise of domesticity that Samuel Richardson successfully represents within Pamela. It seeks to understand how the changing economic conditions in modern England influenced and transformed the social recognition of individual virtue. The historian J. G. A. Pocock explains that the public identification of virtue went through a significant transformation in eighteenth-century England. Virtue traditionally signified a person's capacity to participate within the realm of the political and to become devoted to the public good. The development of the commercial economy and the emergence of new ruling elites, however, brought about changes to the ways in which virtue was publically identified. Virtue in the austerely Roman sense was redefined with the aid of a concept of ”manners.” I situate Richardson's identification of Pamela's virtue within this historical context. I examine how the construction of Pamela's virtue relies heavily upon the economic conditions of her time. I specifically look at how her embodiment of virtue allows her to acquire material value. By examining how Pamela achieves socioeconomic benefits through her public demonstration of virtue, I argue that her embodiment of virtue empowers women to assert a form of political and financial power.

This paper addresses issues raised by the recent critical approaches exemplified by Gillen D'Arcy Wood's and David Higgins' recent readings of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in relation to the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. Rather than directly connecting Frankenstein to the Tambora eruption and its climatic aftermath, however, this paper reads Frankenstein in the broader context of the Anthropocene and explores the interconnection between humans and nonhuman nature and the vulnerability of human beings within the Earth's ecosystem. Its central focus is on the issues of elemental forces and species questions raised in Frankenstein. Employing an anthropocentric perspective on the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature as portrayed in the novel permits us to reconsider the vulnerable status of humankind as one species among many on earth. I read Frankenstein's Creature as embodying the destructive power of elemental forces that brings into high relief the vulnerability of humans and the possibility of human extinction. The Creature's body, composed of heterogeneous parts, reveals the affinity between human and nonhuman bodies. Pointing to the mutual response-ability between Walton and the Creature, the paper suggests that nature, humans must acknowledge the agency of nonhuman nature and respond to it without violence. Shelley's Frankenstein is a novel that warns us of the disastrous effects of anthropocentrism on nonhuman nature and the Earth's ecosystem as a whole that includes humans.