ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book offers a powerful appeal to a collective fantasy, but is perpetually disrupted by the personal, aesthetic and political anxieties prevailing during the 1830s. It proposes a reading of 'Enoch Arden', a poem designed as one of a set of 'Idylls of the Hearth', as symptomatic of the commodification of the aesthetic, and as a text registering the defeat of realism at the hands of an emergent, fragmented and ghostly modernism. The book highlights some of the undeveloped elements, notably in relation to female sexual and literary identity and to the male colonial enterprise, seeing both issues as indissolubly tied to redefinitions of Englishness. It seeks to relate to Q's key role in the inauguration of English studies at Cambridge. The book suggests a re-reading of 'The Soldier' through the lens of Walter Benjamin's materialist historiography.
