Wandering, Form, and the Sentimental Novel

I came upon my dissertation topic almost by chance. In reading for my comprehensive exams, I was so struck by a single word in a poem (“wanderers”) that it determined the course of my future research. The poem, Charlotte Smith’s The Emigrants (1793), works to evoke sympathy for French émigrés who have fled the Terror in France. These wanderers, “outcasts of the world,” are unable to return to a homeland torn apart by revolution. I was startled by the way in which Smith collapses the condition of exile into a sentimental trope of wandering, a rhetorical move that I found both perplexing and intriguing because today we are more likely to associate wandering with aimlessness than with exile, with leisure than with penury