Orienting Virtue: Civic Identity and Orientalism in Britain's Global Eighteenth Century

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-this book examines how England's sense of collective virtue was inflected and informed by 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.