Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830

by Edited by Timothy Fulford , Peter J. Kitson

• ISBN13: 9780521022064
• ISBN10: 0521022061
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-11-03
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Notes on contributors	vii
Acknowledgements	xi
Romanticism and colonialism: texts, contexts, issues	1	(12)
Tim Fulford
Peter J. Kitson
Romanticism and colonialism: races, places, peoples, 1785--1800	13	(22)
Peter J. Kitson
Romanticism and colonialism: races, places, peoples, 1800--1830	35	(13)
Tim Fulford
Accessing India: Orientalism, anti-'Indianism' and the rhetoric of Jones and Burke	48	(19)
Michael J. Franklin
`Sunshine and Shady Groves': what Blake's `Little Black Boy' learned from African writers	67	(20)
Lauren Henry
Blood Sugar	87	(20)
Timothy Morton
`Wisely forgetful': Coleridge and the politics of Pantisocracy	107	(22)
James C. McKusick
Darkness visible? Race and representation in Bristol abolitionist poetry, 1770--1810	129	(19)
Alan Richardson
Fictional constructions of Liberated Africans: Mary Butt Sherwood	148	(17)
Moira Ferguson
`Wandering through Eblis'; absorption and containment in Romantic exoticism	165	(24)
Nigel Leask
The Isle of Devils: The Jamaican journal of M.G. Lewis	189	(17)
D.L. Macdonald
Indian Jugglers: Hazlitt, Romantic Orientalism, and the difference of view	206	(15)
John Whale
`Some samples of the finest Orientalism': Byronic Philhellenism and proto-Zionism at the time of the Congress of Vienna	221	(22)
Caroline Franklin
`Once did she hold the gorgeous East in fee . . .': Byron's Venice and Oriental Empire	243	(18)
Malcolm Kelsall
The plague of imperial desire: Montesquieu, Gibbon, Brougham, and Mary Shelley's The Last Man	261	(18)
Joseph W. Lew
Index	279