Contesting Cosmopolitan Moments in the Long Eighteenth Century traces expansions of Classical cosmopolitanism in long-eighteenth-century Britain to shows how acts of inclusion from cosmopolitan viewpoints sought to cope with British imperialism, war, social injustice, slavery, and technologies of self- and societal improvement, concerns that survive to this day. The Classical inheritance uncovered here yields more precise contouring of cosmopolitanism and of the eighteenth-century innovations that prefigure postcolonial debates. Additionally, considerations of style fill a lacuna in eighteenth-century literary studies, where cosmopolitanism remains a rather under-explored hermeneutical tool. Inviting readers to appreciate cosmopolitanism as a developing rather than as a static and completed philosophy, this study refutes an objection that circulated in the eighteenth century and is still present today, namely, cosmopolitanism’s disdain for local values.

In Enit Steiner's wide-ranging book the literature of the long eighteenth century is reconsidered from a fresh perspective. From Goldsmith to Wollstonecraft to Mary Shelley, Abu Talib and abolitionist literature, Steiner asserts an enduring cosmopolitan spirit where others would previously see little more than a strong proclivity towards universalism. Her approach is anchored in a performative and situationist understanding of cosmopolitanism that eschews its interpretation as an immutable set of values or a reliable manual for world citizenship. -- Galin Tihanov, George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of London
This innovative study sheds new light on both the notion of cosmopolitanism and the nature of the Enlightenment itself. [...] Steiner's diligent tracing of the "philosophical genealogy" of the concepts raised throughout this study may render the book challenging for the general reader, but for specialists and serious students of the Enlightenment, this volume offers essential directives for expanding the contours of both cosmopolitanism and the Enlightenment. -- E. Kraft, emerita, University of Georgia * CHOICE *

Enit Karafili Steiner is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. She is the editor of Cosmopolitan Endeavours (2020), and author of Northanger Abbey/Persuasion: Readers’ Guide to Essential Criticism (2016) and Jane Austen's Civilized Women: Morality, Gender and the Civilizing Process (2012). She has also edited Called to Civil Existence: Dialogues on Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (2014) and Frances Brooke's The History of Lady Julia Mandeville (2013).