ENGLISH 609.49 - Romanticism and Empire
Instructor: Dr. Anne McWhir
Friday, 9:00 - 11:30
Mail to: mcwhir [at] ucalgary [dot] ca
Course Description:
The study of the Romantic period has traditionally focused on the poetics of particular regions and places in isolation from currents of colonialism and empire. Yet Romantic-period models of place and landscape (e.g. William Wordsworth), and master narratives of cultural and national reconciliation (e.g. Sir Walter Scott), were readily adopted as normative far from their places of origin, sometimes serving an imperial agenda. With this in mind, the course will emphasize contexts of colonialism and empire, especially during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Having lost the American colonies, Britain was consolidating power in India; slavery was under attack (the slave trade was abolished in 1807); Napoleon and his armies had swept across Europe and the Mediterranean (before their final defeat in 1815); and Greece was on the point of revolt against the Ottoman Empire (the Greek War of Independence, 1821-29). In these contexts, we will reconsider some familiar texts of British Romanticism and explore some less familiar ones.
Many British Romantic writers were (or at least present themselves as) exiles and wanderers in a world transformed by revolution and empire. How does Romantic-period writing assimilate the knowledge and insight of travelers, traders, scholars, foreigners, fighters and exiles to its (often nostalgic) sense of home? In an attempt to answer this question, the course will historicize the "exotic" elements of selected Romantic texts, and will explore some of the ways in which India, the Middle East and the West Indies were represented and misrepresented-and how they represented themselves-in Romantic-period writing.
Reading: Students will be asked to purchase editions of the poems of Byron and P. B. Shelley and of two novels: Sidney Owenson, The Missionary: An Indian Tale, 1811, and Mary Shelley, The Last Man, 1826 (both available from Broadview Press). I will prepare a course pack including writing by Hannah Cowley, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, Maria Edgeworth, Felicia Hemans, Sir William Jones, Mizra Abu Taleb Khan, Thomas Moore, Amelia Opie, Raja Rammohun Roy, and Robert Southey.
Useful secondary sources include:
Bewell, Alan. Romanticism and Colonial Disease. Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999.
Fulford, Tim, and Peter J. Kitson, eds. Romanticism and Colonialism:Â Writing and Empire, 1780-1830. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
Gilroy, Amanda, ed. Romantic Geographies: Discourses of Travel 1775-1844. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000.
Hofkosh, Sonia, and Alan Richardson, eds. Romanticism, race and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996.
Leask, Nigel. British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.
Makdisi, Saree. Romantic Imperialism:Â Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1994.
