Orienting Virtue - by Bethany Williamson (Paperback)

About the Book

"This book examines how British writers in the the eighteenth century deployed images of the East to shape ideas of virtue and political identity"--

Book Synopsis

What does it mean for a nation and its citizens to be virtuous? The term "virtue" is ubiquitous in eighteenth-century British literature, but its definition is more often assumed than explained. Bringing together two significant threads of eighteenth-century scholarship--one on republican civic identity and the mythic legacy of the freeborn Briton and the other on how England's global encounters were shaped by orientalist fantasies-- Orienting Virtue examines how England's sense of collective virtue was inflected and informed by Eastern empires.

Bethany Williamson shows how England's struggle to define and practice national virtue hinged on the difficulty of articulating an absolute concept of moral value amid dynamic global trade networks. As writers framed England's story of exceptional liberties outside the "rise and fall" narrative they ascribed to other empires, virtue claims encoded anxieties about England's tenuous position on the global stage, especially in relation to the Ottoman, Mughal, and Far Eastern empires. Tracking valences of virtue across the century's political crises and diverse literary genres, Williamson demonstrates how writers consistently deployed virtue claims to imagine a "middle way" between conserving ancient ideals and adapting to complex global realities. Orienting Virtue concludes by emphasizing the ongoing urgency, in our own moment, of balancing competing responsibilities and interests as citizens both of nations and of the world.

Review Quotes

Contributes . . . richly and eloquently to our understanding of eighteenth-century civic discourses, both domestic and imperial.-- "Eighteenth-Century Fiction"

In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the challenges of overseas expansion and changing social relations in Britain caused Britons to reevaluate models of national virtue, at home and abroad. Williamson lays out the historical and conceptual issues at stake and navigates these complex ideas with enviable clarity. Orienting Virtue is a substantial contribution to the field of eighteenth-century studies and will make its mark as a fine example of reading literature (and not only literature) as colonial discourse.

--Suvir Kaul, University of Pennsylvania, author of Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century

About the Author

Bethany Williamson is Associate Professor of English at Biola University.