Imperial Affliction : Eighteenth-Century British Poets and Their Twentieth-Century Lives Hardback

by Thomas Simmons

Part of the Postcolonial Studies series

Hardback

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Description

Â«In many waysÂ», Robert J.C. Young writes, Â«colonization from the very first carried with it the seeds of its own destruction.Â» Imperial Affliction examines some ways in which Youngâ€™s observation could be applied to problems of subjectivity and influence within the colonizing nations themselves, particularly eighteenth-century Britain.

How might these Â«seeds of destructionÂ» manifest themselves as problems of identity?

How might the very selves with greatest access to self-affirmation â€“ the idea of the empire, the idea of British citizenry, the idea of the British self â€“ actually find themselves vulnerable, confused, or damaged? Using multiple forms of postcolonial critique, this book turns back to salient eighteenth-century British lives and work for a different kind of enlightenment.

Among its central subjects are the elusive subjectivity of William Collins; the exilic religious experience of William Cowper and its multiple readings in the twentieth century by a self-fashioned exilic, Donald Davie; the Â«missed encounterÂ» between Christopher Smart and Samuel Johnson, and the ways in which that problem was re-inscribed in the work of W.

Jackson Bate and Lionel Trilling; the problem of imperial fixity in James Cookâ€™s journals with a view to Grayâ€™s Â«ElegyÂ» and Goldsmithâ€™s Â«Deserted VillageÂ»; and the problem of purity as a paradoxically privileged and exilic force in the work of John Newton and Christopher Smart.

In these explorations, this book illustrates both an expanded view of eighteenth-century colonial liabilities and a new emphasis on postcolonial critique as a means of exploring the fissures always present in imperial ambition.