Romantic Literature and Postcolonial Studies

This title examines the relationship between Romantic writing and the rapidly expanding British Empire. Literature played a crucial role in constructing and contesting the modern culture of empire that was fully in place by the start of the Victorian period. Postcolonial criticism’s concern with issues of geopolitics, race and gender, subalternity and exoticism shape discussions of works by major authors such as Blake, Coleridge, Percy and Mary Shelley, Austen and Scott, as well as their less familiar contemporaries. It explains how key theoretical concerns of postcolonial studies – imaginary geography, Otherness & difference and cultural hybridity – have dramatically changed our understanding of Romantic literature. It demonstrates how selected texts, in a range of genres, are illuminated by postcolonial criticism. It includes a bibliographical essay along with an up-to-date bibliography of criticism, editions of primary works and selected historical materials.