"In the eighteenth century, wealth from colonial exploitation swelled the British homeland. This embarrassment of riches spelled contamination for many, a threat to the very meaning of Englishness. Harrow argues that literature responded to concerns over legitimacy, adulteration, and national identity by turning to domestic narratives. By reading the domestic home space in close relation to the domestic nation, Harrow politicizes the domestic and complicates our understanding of the relation between domesticity and cultural difference. She also explores the way the shifting meaning of domesticity paralleled generic and narrative ambiguities. Harrow reads canonical fiction (novels by Defoe, Austen, and Shelley) in a colonial context and analyzes women's travel writing in the context of abolitionist poetry, natural history, and political pamphlets."--BOOK JACKET.