Eighteenth-century British literature and postcolonial studies
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Bibliographic Information
Eighteenth-century British literature and postcolonial studies
（Postcolonial literary studies）
Edinburgh University Press, c2009
- : pbk
- : hardback
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Note
Bibliography: p. [166]-184
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
'This book convincingly challenges both the extremely short historical memory of most postcolonial work and the all-too-insularly English world still conjured by period specialists. Hogarthian whores and Grub Street hacks, coffee houses and fashionable pastimes, and the burgeoning of print culture all stand revealed as intimately bound to portents of plantation insurgency, agitation for abolition, and the vast fortunes produced by the labouring bodies of the poor, the colonized, and the enslaved. Eighteenth-century studies has never appeared in a more engaged and fascinating light.' Professor Donna Landry, University of Kent In this volume Suvir Kaul addresses the relations between literary culture, English commercial and colonial expansion, and the making of 'Great Britain' in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He argues that literary writing played a crucial role in generating the vocabulary of British nationalism, both in inter-national terms and in attempts to realign political and cultural relations between England, Scotland, and Ireland.
The formal innovations and practices characteristic of eighteenth-century English literature were often responses to the worlds brought into view by travel writers, merchants, and colonists. Writers (even those suspicious of mercantile and colonial expansion) worked with a growing sense of a 'national literature' whose achievements would provide the cultural capital adequate to global imperial power, and would distinguish Great Britain for its twin success in 'arms and arts'. The book ranges from Davenant's theatre to Smollet's Roderick Random to Phillis Wheatley's poetry to trace the impact of empire on literary creativity. Key Features *An introduction to the impact of mercantilism and empire on the crafting of eighteenth-century British literature *Encourages students to examine the key formal innovations that define eighteenth-century British literary history as they were produced by writers who redefined their sense of home, nation and the world
Table of Contents
- Timeline
- Introduction: Towards a Postcolonial History of Eighteenth-century English Literature
- Postcolonial Studies and Empire today
- Nation-formation and empire in the eighteenth century
- Territory, trade routes, war and "Great Britain"
- Print and Public Culture
- Literary Creativity, Literary Criticism, Postcolonial Criticism
- Plan of the Book
- Chapter 1: Theaters of empire
- Davenant, the revival of performance, and the thematics of empire
- Aphra Behn, colonial self-making, and the uncertain consolations of romance
- Civil tragedy, commercial humanism, and colonial consciousness
- Chapter 2: The expanding frontiers of prose
- Yariko and Inkle and the staging of polite culture
- Crusoe the merchant-adventurer-and Friday
- Chapter 3: Imaginative writing, intellectual history, and the horizons of British literary culture
- The Spectator, print culture, and the circulation of inter-national value
- The languages of national difference: becoming Roderick Random
- Luxury, Commercial Society, Enlightenment historiography
- Chapter 4: Perspectives from Elsewhere
- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her Turkish Embassy Letters
- Johnson's Rasselas: philosophy in an "oriental" key
- Phillis Wheatley: literacy, poetry, and slavery
- Ukawsaw Gronniosaw: writing in another voice
- Conclusion: Gazing into the Future
- Literary transport: to India and the South Seas
- Bibliography
- Further Reading
- Index.
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