Focusing on the work of Horace Walpole, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Mackenzie, Washington Irving, Charles Brockden Brown, and Edgar Allan Poe, examines how the aesthetics of the romance novel influenced--and was influenced by--emerging modern systems of racial, national, sentimental, and political community.

James D. Lilley is Assistant Professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY. He is editor of Cormac McCarthy: New Directions.