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1 results

  • 26 - Romantic cultural imperialism

  • from Part IV - The Ends of Romanticism
  • Edited by James Chandler
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature
    Published online:
    28 May 2009
    Print publication:
    05 March 2009, pp 601-620

  • Summary

    Scholars gradually recognize that most of the major writers of the Romantic period had at least a passing flirtation with the most prominent cultural component of imperialism, namely, Orientalism. Nature poetry, suggests that Orientalism helped to define political, social and cultural practices in areas far removed from the East itself. the most successful Orientalist tales or pictures in the Romantic period, of which Byron would later claim to provide the finest 'samples' depended upon a sometimes jarring discrepancy. The concept of the sovereign Western subject would prove essential to the work of the empire-builders of the nineteenth century. Wordsworth's struggle is therefore to rescue Poetry from being merely 'a matter of amusement and idle pleasure', as though a taste for Poetry were as indifferent as a taste for Rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or Sherry'. Orientalism, then, was hardly just a thematic 'sideshow' for Romantic poetry.