MLitt Module
EN52008: Romantic Orientalism
The fascination with the East and the Exotic was an important aspect of the British Romantic period. This option will explore the material history of British involvement in the ‘East’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; how that ‘East’ was constructed and represented for a western metropolitan audience; and explore the cultural productions of that involvement in poetry, fictional, prose and visual art.
It will also discuss these works in the light of contemporary postcolonial theories of Orientalism, including criticism by Edward Said, Raymond Schwab, Gayatori Spivak, Abdul JanMohammed, Nigel Leask, Homi Bhabha and John Barrell). This module will concentrate in particular on the representation of the people, places, and cultures of the East including Arabia, China and India.
Texts discussed will include writing by John Hawkesworth, Sir William Jones, S. T. Coleridge, Robert Southey, Percy Shelley, Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), Eliza Hamilton and Thomas De Quincey and Oriental Tales such as the Arabian Nights and Almoran and Hamet.
Primary Texts:
- Elizabeth Hamilton, Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, ed. Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell (Broadview, 2000)
- William Jones, Selected Poetical and Prose Works, ed. Michael J. Franklin (Cardiff, 1995)
- L. Macfie, ed. Orientalism: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000)
- Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), The Missionary ed. Julia Wright (Broadview, 2000)
- Thomas De Quincey, ed. Confessions of an English Opium Eater (Penguin, 1974)
Secondary Texts:
- Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993
- Amal Chatterjee, Representations of India, 1740-1840: the Creation of India in the Colonial Imagination (New York: St Martin's press, 1998)
- Tim Fulford and Peter Kitson, ed. Romanticism and Colonialism (Cambridge, 1999)
- Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge, 1992)
- Joseph W. Lew, 'Sidney Owenson and the fate of Empire', Keats-Shelley-Journal 29 (1990), 36-65
- Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill's The History of British India and Orientalism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992)
- John Drew, India and the Romantic Imagination (Delhi, 1987)
- Indira Ghose, Women Travellers in Colonial India: The Power of the Female Gaze (Delhi,1998)
- Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties in Empire (Cambridge, 1992)
- Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics in Travel-Writing, 1770-1840: 'From an Antique Land' (Oxford, 2004)
- Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford, 1977)
- Balachandra Rajan, Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999)
- Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago, 1992)
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