Fair Exotics : Xenophobic Subjects in English Literature, 172-185 Hardback
by Rajani Sudan
Part of the New Cultural Studies series
Hardback
Description
Arguing that the major hallmarks of Romantic literature—inwardness, emphasis on subjectivity, the individual authorship of selves and texts—were forged during the Enlightenment, Rajani Sudan traces the connections between literary sensibility and British encounters with those persons, ideas, and territories that lay uneasily beyond the national border.
The urge to colonize and discover embraced both an interest in foreign "fair exotics" and a deeply rooted sense of their otherness. Fair Exotics develops a revisionist reading of the period of the British Enlightenment and Romanticism, an age during which England was most aggressively building its empire.
By looking at canonical texts, including Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Johnson's Dictionary, De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and Bronte's Villette, Sudan shows how the imaginative subject is based on a sense of exoticism created by a pervasive fear of what is foreign.
Indeed, as Sudan clarifies, xenophobia is the underpinning not only of nationalism and imperialism but of Romantic subjectivity as well.
Information
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Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
- Format:Hardback
- Pages:208 pages
- Publisher:University of Pennsylvania Press
- Publication Date:02/07/2002
- Category:
- ISBN:9780812236569
Information
-
Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
- Format:Hardback
- Pages:208 pages
- Publisher:University of Pennsylvania Press
- Publication Date:02/07/2002
- Category:
- ISBN:9780812236569
