Romantic Literature And Postcolonial Studies

This book examines the relationship between Romantic writing and the rapidly expanding British Empire. Literature played a crucial role in constructing and contesting the modern culture of empire that was fully in place by the start of the Victorian period. Postcolonial criticism's concern with issues of geopolitics, race and gender, subalternity and exoticism shape discussions of works by major authors such as Blake, Coleridge, both Shelleys, Austen and Scott, as well as their less familiar contemporaries.

Demonstrates the importance of postcolonial approaches to understanding the literature of the period 1787-1833. Arguing that literature of the Romantic period must be understood in the context of British colonial expansion and imperial rule, this text surveys Romantic literature's role in consolidating Britain as the centre of empire. It highlights the ways in which the expanding print market served readers eager to learn about the wider world: Romantic poetry and travel writing, for example, went hand in hand. Elizabeth Bohls shows that while Exoticism and Orientalism help us understand colon.

Postcolonial Romanticisms: Landscape and the Possibilities of Inheritance describes the production of a new and particular kind of postcolonial text and resituates the notion of literary influence in the context of postcolonial literatures. This book addresses the ways in which Derek Walcott, Garrett Hongo, and Jamaica Kincaid have appropriated aspects of «colonial» culture and how they deploy the tropes of British Romanticism in their own texts. Postcolonial Romanticisms argues that Walcott, Hongo, and Kincaid radically reimagine and rewrite the various traditions that have figured their island landscapes as unhistoricized, unoccupied, and marginal. The landscapes that they write about are necessarily politicized; their own subjectivities are intimately implicated in both the natural beauty as well as the traumatic history of place; they confront and engage to varying degrees the history of their postcolonial geographies, the history of diaspora, of slavery, of the capitalist commodification of the landscape, and the devastating consequences this history has on the individual. These postcolonial writers confront what Derek Walcott calls the «shards of an ancient pastoral», the literal and literary remains of colonial cultural authority that clutter their landscapes. Postcolonial Romanticisms is ideally suited for courses in cultural, literary, and postcolonial studies, specifically courses in world literature, global literature, postcolonial literature, Caribbean literature, contemporary poetry, and eco-literary studies.

This book explores Romanticism as a force that exerts an insistent but critically neglected pressure on the postcolonial imagination. From the decolonizing poetics of the Caribbean to the white writing of South Africa, from the aesthetics of post-imperial disappointment to postcolonial theory itself, it develops an account of the textual and philosophical interpenetration of postcolonial aesthetics with Romantic ideas about sense, history and world. What emerges is a reading of Romantic/postcolonial co-involvement that moves beyond well-worn models of intercanonical antagonism and the historicizing biases of conventional literary history. Caught somewhere between the effects of reanimation and estrangement, Romanticism appears here not as a stable textual repository prior to the postcolonial, but as echo, spectre, self-interruption, or vital force, that can yet only emerge in the guise of the afterlife, its agency mediated — but never exhausted — by postcolonial writing.

This book considers indigenous-language translations of Romantic texts in the British colonies. It argues that these translations uncover a latent discourse around colonisation in the original English texts. Focusing on poems by William Wordsworth, John Keats, Felicia Hemans, and Robert Burns, and on Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, it provides the first scholarly insight into the reception of major Romantic authors in indigenous languages, and makes a major contribution to the study of global Romanticism and its colonial heritage. The book demonstrates the ways in which colonial controversies around prayer, song, hospitality, naming, mapping, architecture, and medicine are drawn out by translators to make connections between Romantic literature, its preoccupations, and debates in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial worlds.

This book visits the Romantic legacy that was central to the development of literature and culture from the 1830s onward. Although critical accounts have examined aspects of this long history of indebtedness, this is the first study to survey both Nineteenth and Twentieth century culture. The authors consider the changing notion of Romanticism, looking at the diversity of its writers, the applicability of the term, and the ways in which Romanticism has been reconstituted. The chapters cover relevant historical periods and literary trends, including the Romantic Gothic, the Victorian era, and Modernism as part of a dialectical response to the Romantic legacy. Contributors also examine how Romanticism has been reconstituted within postmodern and postcolonial literature as both a reassessment of the Modernist critique and of the imperial contexts that have throughout this time-frame underpinned the Romantic legacy, bringing into focus the contemporaneity of Romanticism and its political legacy. This collection reveals the diversity and continuing relevance of the genre in new and exciting ways, offering insights into writers such as Browning, Ruskin, Pater, Wilde, Lewis, MacNeice, and Auster.

This book surveys the impact of the British Empire on nineteenth-century British literature from a postcolonial perspective. It explains both pro-imperialist themes and attitudes in works by major Victorian authors, and also points of resistance to and criticisms of the Empire such as abolitionism, as well as the first stirrings of nationalism in India and elsewhere.Using nineteenth-century literary works as illustrations, it analyzes several major debates, central to imperial and postcolonial studies, about imperial historiography and Marxism, gender and race, Orientalism, mimicry, and subalternity and representation. And it provides an in-depth examination of works by several major Victorian authors-Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Disraeli, Tennyson, Yeats, Kipling, and Conrad among them - in the imperial context. Key Features:*Links literary texts to debates in postcolonial studies*Discusses works not included in standard literary histories*Provides in-depth discussions and comparisons of major authors: Disraeli and George Eliot; Dickens and Charlotte Bronte; Tennsyon and Yeats*Provides a guide to further reading and a timeline

Romance, Family, and Nation in Japanese Colonial Literature explores how Japanese writers in Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan used narratives of romantic and familial love in order to traverse the dangerous currents of empire. Focusing on the period between 1937 and 1945, this study discusses how literary renderings of interethnic relations reflect the numerous ways that Japan s imperial expansion was imagined: as an unrequited romance, a reunion of long-separated families, an oppressive endeavor, and a utopian collaboration. The manifestations of romance, marriage, and family in colonial literature foreground how writers positioned themselves vis-à-vis empire and reveal the different conditions, consequences, and constraints that they faced in rendering Japanese colonialism.