In Chapter 5, I follow this lead further and demonstrate that one of the most prominent sites where this new aesthetic regime and its colonial history was articulated most forcefully was the nineteenth-century French novel. Discussing Jacques Rancière’s influential work on novels by Balzac and Flaubert and his suggestion of the new idea of literature emerging through the “democratic petrification” of writing, this chapter shows how the context of such a development in France was historically much wider than developments within its national borders. Instead of thinking the historicity of literature through Europe alone, this chapter shows how the literary sovereign shaped the central ideas of textualization and readability through colonial documents, translations, textual representation of the orient, and so on. This textual history is then embedded within larger registers of visuality in contemporary French cultures that extended the colonial paradigm further.

Chapter 3 begins with a reading of A House for Mr Biswas (1961), a work that marks an epistemic shift in Naipaul’s thinking. The novel does for the plantation diaspora what Balzac did for France. After a careful reading of this triumphal novel, the chapter shows Naipaul’s fascination with modernist compositional features in his much-neglected Mr Stone and the Knights Companion (1963). Then, suddenly uncompleted mourning creeps in. The product of that deepening melancholic imagination is his “placid” and poetic The Mimic Men (1967). It is a compulsion towards aesthetic design, to qualities by which a work of art is judged, that take him to a very personal engagement with Englishness where Naipaul takes on the challenging discourse of Romanticism (a poetic register co-existing with the high point of British imperialism). In Wordsworth there is the memorable account of the poet meeting a leech gatherer; in The Enigma of Arrival Naipaul encounters his own version of the leech gatherer even as he begins to understand that “Englishness” was always a learning process for both the colonial and the colonized.

Focussing on the 1820s and 30s, traditionally seen as transitional decades when many leading Romantic writers passed away, Chapter Fifteen analyses the effects of politics and of the cultural marketplace on literary production, arguing for a late-Romantic episteme recognisable in Britain, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy. After discussing some of problems inherent in the concept of late Romanticism, the author defines it as a series of cultural practices including improvisation, speculation, and performance that reflect the transitory nature of the period. This has been alternately labelled in German literary history as Spätromantik, Biedermeier, and Vormärz, none of which perfectly correspond. Informed by recent research in book and media history, the chapter discusses periodicals’ role in shaping the literary field, in particular Costumbrismo in Spain. These new forms of experimental and ephemeral writing reflect the period’s intense commercialism and consciousness of time, which contrast with the Romantic desire for transcendence. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s last story, ‘Des Vetters Eckfenster’ [My Cousin’s Corner Window], Walladmor, a satirical hoax in imitation of Walter Scott, and Balzac’s Colonel Chabert, serve as examples of late-Romantic tendencies.

Chapter nine explores the phenomenon of historical dislocation and displacement in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, focussing on early and later French Romanticism, but also drawing comparisons with other literatures. It shows how the Revolution’s effects extended throughout Europe, encouraging the circulation of people and texts. Opening with the soundscapes of Romanticism, the chapter moves on to aristocratic memoirs and autobiographies by celebrity exiles such as Chateaubriand but also little-known authors. It then develops the themes of errancy, melancholy, and death in prose and poetry, touching on works by Lamartine, Duras, Desbordes-Valmore, Vigny, Hugo, and others. Seth devotes particular attention to another famous writer in exile, Germaine de Staël. Making politics an integral part of literature, Staël and her circle spread their liberal ideas through their novels and essays, but also through translation, which contributed to the circulation of Romantic genres such as Gothic and historical fiction. The chapter concludes with a section on Waterloo, which marked the end of French hegemony, a historical loss mourned in poems and novels by Balzac and Stendhal, but that also opened the way for a sense of shared European identity.

Chapter Fourteen explores the relation between poetics and Restoration politics in Germany, France, and Italy. It argues that, similar to earlier aesthetic responses to the failure of the French Revolution, writers sought alternatives to the political and geographic order established at Vienna, imagining works that synthesise the past and the present in order to inspire change. After explaining why the Restoration left Britain largely unscathed, the author looks at examples of literary and political restoration in Novalis, Chateaubriand, Lamenais, and Metternich to show how restoration did not mean a nostalgic return into the past but rather the creation of something new. The chapter then compares the Restoration poetics of Quinet, Hugo and Gautier, suggesting that they advocate the ‘grotesque’ through the recovery of Shakespeare, to imagine a more comprehensive and liberal vision of society than that set forth by Metternich. Balzac’s La comédie humaine serves as a counter-example, ending in a cynicism at odds with the idealism of George Sand. The chapter’s last section compares the political uses of loss, exile, and restoration in two great Italian poets, Foscolo and Leopardi, concluding with a close reading ‘La Sera del dì di festa’ to show how political hope was kept alive.

The realist novel can be understood to bear witness to a changed understanding of history, ushered in with the modern era. This chapter argues that the French realist novel grew out of the historical novel, insofar as it attempted to offer a history of the present. However, a history of the present is challenging if not impossible to write because of the difficulty, and even the impossibility, of achieving a sufficiently distanced vantage point. French realist novels, consequently, aim to represent present reality but indirectly suggest the impossibility of any such representation. The chapter goes on to show that the French realist novels of the 1830s draw attention to the changeable nature of the present, partly because of the unstable social and political contexts of nineteenth-century France, and partly because of a shift in the way that people conceived of present reality. In at least two broad and closely interconnected senses, therefore, the early French realist novel is profoundly historical in its ambitions: it aims to offer a history of the present, however flawed that attempted history necessarily is, and it reveals the historical, or mutable, qualities of the present that it attempts to capture.

Chapter Seven marks a turn away from consideration of ways in which the material presence of the map bears upon authorial and readerly meaning-making, to ways in which the absence, or internalisation, of the map affects the reader’s engagement with the text. Literary mapping is unusual by comparison with maps in other disciplines, in that the question of why a map is not present, or is withheld, can be of as much interest as its presence. This chapter addresses a question that implicitly emerges from the earlier chapters: why do maps occur so frequently in popular genres but extremely infrequently in canonical texts (especially the realist novel)? After exploring this issue through debates around realism and representation in France and Britain, the chapter considers two rare canonical authors who do use maps in relation to the realist novel: Trollope and Hardy. (141)