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This study examines the form and function of Charlotte Smith's allusions to the plays of Shakespeare in her poetry and novels. Reading Smith alongside the playwright foregrounds her comedy, irony, interpretive ability, and representations of sensibility, while adding to our understanding of Shakespeare's importance to writers of the Romantic period. Smith crosses genres in her poetry when incorporating references to Shakespeare and his characters in ways similar to what G. Gabriella Starr observes in eighteenth-century novels when they absorb the lyric. Borrowing Shakespeare's dramatic prose and verse, Smith expresses the emotions of others as well as her own, and assumes the authority to write as a woman on such topics as lost love, sorrow, politics, and natural history in her sonnets, The Emigrants, Beachy Head, and other poems. While using the popular conventions of romance and Gothic literature, Smith appropriates from Shakespeare in her novels to develop her protagonists and satirize her society and individual behaviors and attitudes, beginning with her first novel, Emmeline. In later novels, Smith adds the satire of romance and Gothic conventions, while knowing that she must still write within them. Using Anne K. Mellor's definition of Romantic irony, I argue that Smith's works contain both skepticism toward her satiric targets, and enthusiasm for such things as sensibility and liberal social and political ideas. In the novels whose plots are situated during the French Revolution, Desmond and The Banished Man, Smith continues to develop sentimental scenes and to satirize characters, while introducing political commentary. However, these novels contain little generic satire, since Smith treats her subject more seriously. At the height of her comedic powers, Smith self-reflexively parodies the romance genre and its characters by giving her protagonists romance characteristics and ways of viewing the world. In doing so, especially in The Old Manor House and The Young Philosopher, she demonstrates the inadequacy of such a fictional vision.

As T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams rejected the previous century's high culture of letters, they could not rely on pre-existing cultural institutions to provide their authority; they needed instead to find ways to authorize their own work. Their first attempts to address a general audience all found that way in imaginings of new \"virtual communities\": national cultural communities of which the artists themselves are the embodiment and which their artistic projects exemplify. These communities are not examples of Benedict Anderson's definition of the nation as an imagined community: not only are they individually rather than collectively imagined, but where Anderson shows the crucial role cultural forms plays in the creation of the politics of the nation, these writers all take the political form and put it to cultural and aesthetic uses. Because these cultural communities are idiosyncratic and projected outwards from the writer's self, the writer's body becomes a central trope in the imagining of the community, functioning either as the ground of or a barrier to the authority the writer seeks to exemplify. The body is both the irreducible site of selfhood and a figure for disparate elements brought together in something larger. In the modernist literary imagination, it becomes the repository of literary tradition and the figure of the nation: the writer's bones both carry the tradition and disappear into the ground on which that tradition flourishes. These very different writers' common identification of their projects with a broader national project must make us reconsider any easy oppositions we might make among them. It must also lead us to reconsider the ways in which we too often depict cultural production as being used by political forces without considering the way political forms can be put to cultural uses. Similarly, if we are to understand our own postmodernist era, we must understand its shaping by modernism; therefore my epilogue examines the sorts of communities we more typically consider \"virtual,\" those created on the Internet. In doing so I seek to provide historicity to our current understanding of virtuality and to demonstrate that the international and multivocal communities formed on the Internet are shaped in fundamental ways by modernist imaginings of national cultural communities.