Contemporary scholarship on fandom explores how communities are created through affinities of taste. Drawing on that work, this chapter argues that Cicero’s account in De Finibus and Pro Archia of his and his fellow Romans’ investment in and debt to Athenian literature experiments with the effects of passionately identifying with another culture – thus opening up ways of thinking and feeling about citizenship as an aesthetic property that transcends the limits of ethnic or linguistic identity. Hellenistic literature, organiSed in part around the trope of Athens as a universalist model of human excellence – a trope used first by Athenian writers and appropriated by writers in both Greek and Latin in the first century BCE – helps make the concept of universal citizenship thinkable, not only for Romans like Cicero but for readers over centuries (including scholars and students of 'classics' today) who shared and sustained his investment in the Athenian Greek past. This fantasy of cultural belonging obscures the violence of Roman imperial reality and helps explain the persistent appeal of 'classical' Greek literature.

The chapter analyses the integral role that literary writing in English, and especially the realist novel, played in imaginatively shaping, structuring and on occasion obscuring processes of nineteenth-century globalization. Taking Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848) and Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) as case studies, we make two main points: first, that empire formed the constitutive ground of processes of globalization in the period; and, second, that realist fiction provided a means through which these processes could be understood and questioned, from vantage points both metropolitan or northern (Dickens) and peripheral or southern (Schreiner). We proceed in this chapter on the conviction that imperialism was an essential aspect of globalization throughout the long nineteenth century, redistributing wealth and restructuring the global economy in favour of imperial power. Globalization and empire were therefore folded into one another, taking on different features at their geographic and economic cores and peripheral edges. Taking illustrative examples from Dickens in the heart of the Empire and Schreiner at a zone of peripheral extraction, the chapter captures two contrasting yet complementary literary responses to this system.

The book opens by discussing the importance of emotion in eighteenth-century theatre in Britain; plays endorsed it, actors performed it, and audiences came to the theatre prepared to experience it. It argues that because audiences judged a play and theatre in general in terms of the emotion it excited, the drama of this period should not be considered as a genre but rather as a mode. Formalist approaches are inadequate and have resulted in a false denigration of later eighteenth-century theatre at a time when moralists and critics praised it as a source of virtue because it enhanced fellow-feeling. Raymond Williams’s concept of‘structures of feeling ‘ provides a means of approaching the theatre of the later eighteenth century as affect rather than form because it focuses on experience, just as eighteenth-century theatregoers focused on their experience of feeling. The introduction concludes with a definition of common eighteenth-century terms such as‘sentiment ‘ and‘sensibility ‘ and their application to theatrical performance.