Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830edited by Tim Fulford
and Peter J. Kitson
The relationships between literary discourse and colonial politics
have been the subject of much critical investigation since the publication
of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Yet although much has been written
about the forms these relationships took in the early modern period
and in the nineteenth century, the Romantic period has been comparatively
neglected. This volume sets out to redress that imbalance by investigating
Romantic writing in its relationship to the peoples and places with
which the British were increasingly coming into contact. Topics examined
include slavery, race, climate, tropical disease, religion, and commodity
production; a wide range of writers are discussed from Edmund Burke
to Hannah More, William Blake to Phyllis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano to
Mary Shelley, Thomas Clarkson to Lord Byron. Together the essays constitute
a broad assessment of Romanticism’s engagement with India, Africa, the
West Indies, South America, and the Middle East.
Contents: 1. Romanticism and colonialism: texts, contexts, issues
- Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson; 2.
Romanticism and colonialism: races, places, peoples, 1785-1800 - Peter
J. Kitson; 3. Romanticism and colonialism:
races, places, peoples, 1800-1830 - Tim Fulford; 4. Accessing India:
orientalism, anti-‘Indianism’, and the rhetoric of Jones and Burke -
Michael J. Franklin; 5. ‘Sunshine and Shady Groves’: what Blake’s ‘Little
Black Boy’ learned from African writers - Lauren Henry; 6. Blood sugar
- Timothy Morton; 7. ‘Wisely Forgetful’: Coleridge and the politics
of pantisocracy - James C. McKusick; 8. Darkness visible?: race and
representation in Bristol abolitionist poetry, 1770-1810 - Alan Richardson;
9. Fictional constructions of liberated Africans - Moira Ferguson; 10.
‘Wandering through Eblis’: absorption and containment in Romantic exoticism
- Nigel Leask; 11. The Isle of Devils: the Jamaican journal of M. G.
Lewis - D. L. Macdonald; 12. Indian jugglers: Hazlitt, Romantic orientalism,
and the difference of view - John Whale; 13. ‘Some samples of the finest
orientalism’: Byronic philhellenism and proto-Zionism at the time of
the congress of Vienna - Caroline Franklin; 14. ‘Once did she hold the
gorgeous East in fee ...’: Byron’s Venice and oriental empire - Malcolm
Kelsall; 15. The plague of imperial desire: Montesquieu, Gibbon, Brougham,
and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man - Joseph W. Lew.
1998 299 pp.
0521591430 Hardback
£35.00
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