Representing Place in British Literature and Culture, 1660–1830. From Local to Global. Ed. Evan Gottlieb and Juliet Shields

• Jürgen Meyer

The present volume aims at enhancing our understanding of the ambivalent, multidimensional process of identity formation in Britain during the Long Eighteenth Century. The collection is framed by the editors’ brief introduction and Dafydd Moore’s concluding “Coda”: The former “calls into question the meanings of Britishness by exploring the discrete but interrelated literatures, cultures, and histories of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales” and aims at “the de-naturalization of the nation-state as a category for ordering and interpreting literary history”. Accordingly, Moore, in his helpful survey on past “devolutionary criticism”, complicates the notion of “British ness” by dissolving it into a relative, local and thus almost incommunicable concept whose meaning ‘always already’ depends on speaker, situation, and context, which all feed into its post-colonial re-definition as a culturally hybrid and geographically “poly-centric British Enlightenment”.