Stressing the continuities between Enlightenment and Revolution, new studies have explored the ways in which the crises that overwhelmed the 18th century Italian states encouraged Italian thinkers to engage with the transnational political and intellectual debates of the age. Although the Italian Republics were set up only after the arrival of the first French armies in 1796, their democratic and republican ideals had been firmly established long before. Despite tensions between French and Italian republicans, new studies show that many French military and civil officials remained strongly committed to a project of democratization despite the territorial ambitions of the Directory, while the political positions of the Italian republicans varied greatly, as did their attitudes towards France and the Revolution. The chapter then moves to consider why the Italian peninsula became the principal theater of the European counterrevolution in 1799, and concludes by examining how these experiences shaped the ways in which the next generation of Italian democrats and liberals formulated their own understandings of the French Revolution of 1789, its place in the Atlantic Revolutions, in the Napoleonic sequel and in their own history.

A specific type of nationalism developed in Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. It differed from New World nationalisms (in the tradition of George Washington, Toussaint Louverture and Simón Bolívar) in a number of respects. It was spearheaded to a large extent by writers, artists, and intellectuals (in the fields of cultural production and knowledge production) rather than by political and popular activists; as such it affected existing states and newly emergent nations alike; and its main impact was through the reconceptualization of the state, its self-image, and its institutions, rather than through popular mobilization. Its main tenet – that the state should reflect, and indeed be defined by, the ethnocultural nationality of its inhabitants – was applied in the Peace Treaties of 1919 as an overriding principle in international law (the peoples’ right to self-determination) and still informs our current assumption that the default state is the “nation-state.”

Chapter Five focusses on another popular literary discourse, the Gothic, which emerged in the middle of the century and has sometimes been seen as a negative form of the sublime. Wright argues that it fuses various national and generic sources, troubling cultural boundaries and playing an important role in the development of Romantic literature despite its ‘terroristic’ association. Originating in European romance, the literary Gothic circulated around the continent via translations and free adaptations, making it difficult to identify specific sources. Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and Beckford’s Vathek, for example, rely on a combination of often unattributed British and French texts, whereas Ann Radcliffe’s European reception shows the permeability of cultural boundaries and reveals a community of tastes bridging the Channel. Wright then discusses French and especially German Gothic works, which became increasingly popular during the French Revolution, including The Book of Spectres, which indirectly influenced the age’s best-known Gothic romance, Frankenstein. As the author shows, the Gothic fostered communities of readers that transcended national borders, escaping the nationalist labels reviewers had attributed as a way of dismissing the genre, and making it truly cosmopolitan despite its local differences.

This second edition of The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald offers both new and familiar readers an authoritative guide to the full scope of Fitzgerald’s literary legacy. Gathering the critical insights of leading Fitzgerald specialists, it includes newly commissioned essays on The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, Zelda Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald’s judgment of his peers, and Fitzgerald’s screenwriting and Hollywood years, alongside updated and revised versions of four of the best essays from the first edition on such topics as youth, maturity, and sexuality; the short stories and autobiographical essays; and Americans in Europe. It also includes an essay on Fitzgerald’s critical and cultural reputation in the first decades of the twenty-first century and an up-to-date bibliography of the best Fitzgerald scholarship and criticism for further reading.

The government and people of Great Britain played a significant role in the events of Latin American independence, but the admiration was mutual. British politicians, industrialists and abolitionists looked toward Iberian America as a place of opportunity and fortune, and as a place that was far enough away to carry out experiments with reformist ideas. In return, Latin American patriots looked toward Great Britain for the naval protection it could provide, to its armaments and woollen factories for material goods, and to its banks for development loans. People on both sides of the Atlantic assessed their public and private interests and sought results on their own terms. But it also was more than a military, diplomatic and commercial relationship. There were equally significant cultural exchanges in the form of scientific knowledge, legal structures, pedagogical theories, Masonic practices, incentives to abolish slavery, and the beginning of an active book trade. On an individual, human level, there were also hundreds of long-standing, fond personal friendships and family connections that spanned both language and geographical space. British involvement in Latin American independence was much broader than just the diplomatic and military spheres; it encompassed economic, material, intellectual, cultural and human exchanges as well.

The transatlantic intellectual movement today called “the Enlightenment” took particular forms in British North America during the American Revolution. This essay explores four interlocking Enlightenment concepts as used by eighteenth-century Americans to describe their political revolt against British monarchical rule: nature, progress, reason, and revolution. Americans appealed to nature to delegitimize claims to authority that rested on history, custom, divine access, and lineage. Dispensing with cyclical ideas of history and decline narratives from the Bible, they invented the new idea of progress as a way to describe social and political improvements resulting from human reason. They described reason, in turn, as a distinct mode of knowledge resulting from sensory data, opposing it to knowledge resting on belief or the passions alone. Finally, they described their own break with Britain as a revolution because it seemed to show the reality of progress toward a better world of reason, natural rights, and government by the people. The essay also surveys the historiography on “the American Enlightenment,” a term invented by Americans during the Cold War era amid fears of Soviet-style totalitarianism. Eighteenth-century people themselves spoke of “enlightenment” as a never-ending process rather than a finished project.

In the works of controversy that poured from the presses in the century after the Reformation in England, religious opponents regularly called each other by the names of animals. Biblical animals were favored by both puritans and conformists in the early Tudor era, as controversialists sought to claim for their own words the authority of scripture. The metaphoric animals employed by Elizabethan controversialists were more varied, derived from biblical, classical, and some popular sources. By the mid-seventeenth century, the rhetorical animals evoked by religious controversialists were drawn from a wide range of mostly secular sources and were notable for figuring predatory violence, monstrosity, and grotesqueness. Everyday experience of animals was kept strictly separate from the roles that they were assigned in polemical tracts. Arguably, the extreme animalizing of opponents contributed to the failure of negotiation and compromise as civil war approached.

This chapter reads Hamlet in the light of debates in early modern animal studies, arguing that it is a play that responds to contemporary religious and philosophical questions about the distinction between humans and animals in its representation of flesh and of death. In particular, it focuses on ideas about the difference between human and animal death, and sees in Hamlet a challenge to the assumption of human immortality, reading human fleshiness – our edibility – as lying at the core of the play’s contemplations. In what is often regarded as Shakespeare’s key exploration of “the human,” the chapter argues that what can be found is a conception of our species that offers a challenge to the anthropocentrism of the early modern period, but also of our own.

The American federal union was created in 1781 by the Articles of Confederation. Designed to protect the independence and promote the interests of the member-states, it concentrated power over international matters and war in a central government. Although the Articles granted extensive powers to a congress of states, their implementation was left to the state governments. This arrangement proved dysfunctional and by early 1787, the future of the union was in doubt. The Constitution challenged neither the aims nor the purposes of the American union. Instead, it radically reformed its structure. It set up a central government with a legislative, executive and judicial branch and the right to legislate directly on the individual citizens of the American states. By allowing the federal government to operate independently of the states, the problem of the non-implementation of congressional decisions was overcome. Only with the adoption of the Constitution did the American union acquire national cohesion and a central government with the capacity to act with determination and energy against foreign powers and stateless peoples on the North American continent.

On 19 March 1812, after much deliberation, the Spanish parliament, the Cortes, promulgated Spain’s first written constitution, the celebrated Constitution of Cádiz.1 Seen in the context of the Age of Revolutions, a time when political revolutions in the Thirteen Colonies, France, and Haiti were accompanied by written constitutions, the 1812 Constitution of Cádiz was not exactly at the vanguard of the Atlantic world. Nonetheless, the importance and peculiarity of this constitution lay not in the content or nature of the document but in who was involved in its design. The constitution of the United States of America, the many French constitutions during the revolutionary period, and the various Haitian constitutions written beginning in 1801 were primarily a product of one hemisphere or the other, but not both. In contrast, Spain’s Constitution of 1812 came about as a result of an imperial parliament with deputies representing the multiplicity of territories of Spain’s oceanic empire.

There was not one unified revolutionary process in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, but several revolutions, each with its own rhythm and logic. In the last years of the eighteenth century, each population group asserted itself by opposing the others. The masters of the colony, the White settlers, wanted to be able to govern themselves, until they became practically independent. At first, they clashed with the property-owning men of color, who demanded civil equality for all free men. The revolt of the plantation slaves of the North Plain reshuffled the cards: general liberty and the reality of republican universalism were crucial starting in 1793. If the revolution upset the conditions and status of the whole population, it also took different forms, according to the pre-revolutionary social structures. Moreover, colonial revolutions are always in interaction with the phases of the revolution in the metropole. That interaction took the form of reaction by the white colonists bent on maintaining slavery and free people of color eager to preserve revolutionary achievements. It also took the form of harmony, in which case the search for equality before the law was offered as a step towards a new citizenship.

This chapter offers a critical analysis of how scholars have interpreted the relationship between eighteenth-century cultural practice and revolutionary politics, circa 1760 to 1825. The chapter first surveys and classifies eighteenth century cultural practice, identifying three main types: the social arts, practices of everyday life, and fine arts. The bulk of the essay then reflects on three major paradigms for interpreting how these forms of culture interacted with revolutionary politics. The dominant approach, exemplified by literature on the “bourgeois public sphere,” argues that eighteenth-century culture prefigured or lay the groundwork for revolutionary politics. Other scholars, particularly those working on the fine arts in the revolutionary era, have emphasized how cultural practices were transformed by revolutionary politics. A third, newer approach emphasizes the autonomy of cultural practice. Scholars working within this paradigm argue that cultural change was itself a form of revolution and that culture acted as an independent container for new political practices during the revolutionary era. This paradigm points the way to a broader, more inclusive account of revolution in this period. The essay covers the historiographies of eighteenth-century culture and revolutionary politics in North America, Europe (especially France and the Netherlands), and Latin America (especially Peru).

The Cambridge Edition of Tender Is the Night declares that it “chronicles the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychiatrist, and his wife, Nicole, who is one of his patients.” Likewise, Penguin describes the book as “the account of a caring man who disintegrates under the twin strains of his wife’s derangement and [their] lifestyle.” This chapter challenges the androcentric, victim-blaming nature of these long-accepted readings and argues that we have not paid sufficient attention to the sexual violence that permeates Fitzgerald’s novel. More specifically, it explores the conceptual, contextual, and formal ways that the book creates sympathy for Dick Diver, and then it asks readers to consider how our understanding of the text might change if we shift our attention to Nicole, whose adolescent violation is both the inciting event of the novel and occupies its center, literally and figuratively. Taking into consideration Fitzgerald’s literary aspirations alongside the novel’s formal complexity, the chapter argues that Tender Is the Night shares some of the modernist qualities of Fitzgerald’s contemporaries as well as their intensifying anxieties over female sexuality and concludes that by tending to Nicole’s trauma, Tender is as much a novel of recovery and redemption as one of dissipation and decline.

“Cacophony” was the term appropriately chosen by David Bell more than twenty years ago to sum up recent research on early modern nationalism (in France).1 His diagnosis still stands. The sources of this dissonance can clearly be traced to the “political language” (as Pocock and Skinner call it) of nationhood itself. Its longue durée encourages the assumption that the nation was “always already” there; moreover, it is many sided, and its key concepts – nation, Volk, (father)land, kingdom, the French, the Germans, etc. – are each distinct rather than interchangeable.2 Because this political language displays a high degree of congruency across the individual language areas of early modern Latin Christendom, this congruence of signifiers in the vernacular is frequently taken at face value to equal a congruence of the things signified.