The 1860s opened with a new geopolitical prospect for Europe: Italian unification, achieved in 1861. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, outspoken supporter of Italian independence, tracked the period of transition between the 1859 Second War of Independence and the creation of the new nation-state in her final work, collected in Last Poems[GK8] (1862). Though understudied patriotic poems like “The Sword of Castruccio Castracani,” “Garibaldi,” and “The King’s Gift” look forward to celebrate an anticipated national consensus, they also look back, working through public processes of mourning. Celebrating the unification of disparate kingdoms and imperial territories under a constitutional monarchy might have been particularly resonant for the UK as a nineteenth-century nation-state, as British enthusiasm for the Risorgimento suggests; however, attention to Barrett Browning’s transatlantic publication contexts and political-historical content , as the American Civil War began to unfold, reminds readers that civil strife and territorial dissolution remain ever-present undercurrents to nation-state creation.

An examination of the ways in which Collins avoided explicit political commentary while integrating contempoary political issues into his plots

Frances Burney's final novel, The Wanderer (1814), opens with the eponymous wanderer, the disguised English aristocrat Juliet Granville, who becomes known by the assumed name Ellis, attempting to cross the English Channel to escape the French Revolution. This geographical position points to her marginalization throughout the novel:

Ellis first appears as a genderless, classless, and bodiless voice, recognizable only – though incorrectly – in national terms, as French. Ellis is, indeed, an emigrant fleeing revolutionary France; however, she also becomes an internal refugee in her native Britain over the course of Burney's novel. Unaccepted by the lands of her birth and upbringing, Britain and France, Ellis is stateless, trapped between unreformed and revolutionary regimes.

The liminal place Ellis occupies in the novel's opening, however, also suggests her ability to cross borders and test out “imagined … communit[ies],” to explore their affective draws and their failings; her geographical movement and downward socio-economic mobility expose her to different ways of life, expanding her social sympathies and allowing her to critique Britain from an outsider's perspective. Ellis's movement in the novel resembles what James Buzard describes as autoethnographic fiction’s

Both an English aristocrat restored to her homeland, family, and rank over the course of the narrative and an émigré without an identifiable name, class, or even ethnicity for much of the text, Ellis occupies a unique inside-outside position with respect to Britain's political and socio-economic systems that permits her to cultivate simultaneous sympathy for and critical distance from her homeland.