Brown Romantics

Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century

By (author) Manu Samriti Chander

Publication date:

23 June 2017

Length of book:

144 pages

Publisher

Bucknell University Press

ISBN-13: 9781611488210

Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century proceeds from the conviction that it is high time for the academy in general and scholars of European Romanticism to acknowledge the extensive international impact of Romantic poetry. Chander demonstrates the importance of Romantic notions of authorship to such poets as Henry Derozio (India), Egbert Martin (Guyana), and Henry Lawson (Australia), using the work of these poets, each prominent in the national cultural of his own country, to explain the crucial role that the Romantic myth of the poet qua legislator plays in the development of nationalist movements across the globe. The first study of its kind, Brown Romantics examines how each of these authors develop poetic means of negotiating such key issues as colonialism, immigration, race, and ethnicity.

Introduction: World Literature and World Legislation
Chapter 1: Henry Derozio and the Beginnings of Indian Romanticism
Chapter 2: Christian Romanticism in British Guiana: The Case of Egbert Martin
Chapter 3: Henry Lawson and the Legacy of Romantic Sympathy
Chapter 4: Conclusion: Brown Keats
Afterword
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

“Chander rightly calls for a focus on “how diverse readers read diverse texts” (100) that will reconstitute the ﬁeld of anglophone Romanticism … This is the sharpest innovation of Brown Romantics and what it requires from the ﬁeld is more scholarship toward a new literary history of empire. Chander shows that he understands the stakes, when he disarmingly describes his vital book as a “casting call for nineteenth-century poets of color” (107). It is a call that forces the question “what does it really take to count as a Romantic?.... [I]f literature scholars are going to understand empire, we are going to need to identify new reading publics and then reconcile them with the voluminous data provided by historians. Identifying those new literary cultures is the ambition of Manu Samriti Chander’s Brown Romantics and Nikki Hessell’s Romantic Literature and the Colo-nised World, two of the most important recent books published in Romanticism studies. The authors and publics they introduce and the methods they use to organize them should have profound consequences for how Romanticism deﬁnes itself as a ﬁeld.