Nation-Space in Enlightenment Britain

Mita Choudhury

"Nation-Space in Enlightenment Britain: An Archaeology of Empire is a provocative intervention that extends the parameters of on-going dialogues about British identity during the Enlightenment. Drawing on literary, theatrical, artistic, and other cultural productions, this book describes how British identity emerges not despite of but due to its fluid, volatile, and subversive impulses and expressions. The imperial establishment--codified in the logics of the corporation, the academy, the cathedral, the theater, as well the private parlor or garden--derives its power from scripting and championing a resistance to precisely those subversive elements which threaten or undermine the foundations of order and liberalism in civil society. Choudhury argues that imperial Britain can best be understood in terms of this culture's investment in spatial alignments which celebrated a radial...