Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830

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.

• The first broad, sustained investigation into the relationship between British Romanticism and colonial politics, including race and slavery • Wide range of both canonical and less familiar authors: Romantic poets, political theorists and campaigners, women writers, slave writers • Covers broad geographical range of imperial contexts: India, Africa, West Indies, South America, the Middle East

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.