Romantic Literature And The Colonised World

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.

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indigenous peoples in North America and the Pacific engaged with the latest and most fashionable British Romantic poetry as part of transcontinental and transoceanic cross-cultural negotiations about sovereignty, treaty rights, and land claims. In Sensitive Negotiations, Nikki Hessell uses examples from North America, Africa, and the Pacific to show how these Indigenous figures quoted lines from famous poets like Lord Byron and Felicia Hemans to build sympathy and community with their audience. Hessell makes new connections by setting aside European-derived genre barriers to bring literary studies to bear on the study of diplomacy and scholarship from diplomatic history and Indigenous studies to bear on literary criticism. By connecting British Romantic poetry with Indigenous diplomatic texts, artefacts, and rituals, Hessell reimagines poetry as diplomatic and diplomacy as poetic.

By addressing these and other intriguing questions, Kevin Hutchings highlights significant intersections between Green Romanticism and colonial politics, demonstrating how contemporary understandings of animality, climate, and habitat informed literary and cross-cultural debates about race, slavery, colonialism, and nature in the British Atlantic world. Revealing an innovative dialogue between British, African, and Native American writers of the Romantic period, this book will be of interest to anyone wishing to consider the interconnected histories of transatlantic colonial relations and environmental thought.

Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century proceeds from the conviction that it is high time for the academy in general and scholars of European Romanticism to acknowledge the extensive international impact of Romantic poetry. Chander demonstrates the importance of Romantic notions of authorship to such poets as Henry Derozio (India), Egbert Martin (Guyana), and Henry Lawson (Australia), using the work of these poets, each prominent in the national cultural of his own country, to explain the crucial role that the Romantic myth of the poet qua legislator plays in the development of nationalist movements across the globe. The first study of its kind, Brown Romantics examines how each of these authors develop poetic means of negotiating such key issues as colonialism, immigration, race, and ethnicity.

This book explores what it means to read the six major works of Jane Austen, in light of the ten major works of fiction by Charlotte Smith. It proposes that Smith had a deep and lasting impact on Austen, but this is not an influence study. Instead, it argues for the possibility that two authors who never met could between them write something into being, both responding to and creating a novelistic zeitgeist. This, the book argues, can be called co-writing. This book will appeal to students and scholars of the novel, of women’s writing, and of Smith and Austen specifically.

This accessible collection of essays provides an essential introduction to the volume of poetry that defined British Romanticism.

This book investigates how French Romanticism was shaped by and contributed to colonial discourses of race. It studies the ways in which metropolitan Romantic novels—that is, novels by French authors such as Victor Hugo, George Sand, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, François René de Chateaubriand, Claire de Duras, and Prosper Mérimée—comprehend and construct colonized peoples, fashion French identity in the context of colonialism, and record the encounter between Europeans and non-Europeans. While the primary texts that come under investigation in the book are novels, close attention is paid to Romantic fiction’s interdependence with naturalist treatises, travel writing, abolitionist texts, and ethnographies. Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination is one of the first books to carry out a sustained and comprehensive analysis of the French Romantic novel’s racial imagination that encompasses several sites of colonial contact: the Indian Ocean, North America, the Caribbean, West Africa, and France. Its archival research and interdisciplinary approach shed new light on canonical texts and expose the reader to non-canonical ones. The book will be useful to students and academics involved with Romanticism, colonial historians, students and scholars of transatlantic studies and postcolonial studies, as well as those interested in questions of race and colonialism.

In The Culture of Love in China and Europe Paolo Santangelo and Gábor Boros offer a survey of the cults of love developed in the history of ideas and literary production in China and Europe between the 12th and early 19th century. They describe parallel evolutions within the two cultures, and how innovatively these independent civilisations developed their own categories and myths to explain, exalt but also control the emotions of love and their behavioural expressions. The analyses contain rich materials for comparison, point out the universal and specific elements in each culture, and hint at differences and resemblances, without ignoring the peculiar beauty and attractive force of the texts cultivating love.