Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies

Suvir Kaul

Published by Edinburgh University Press 2009

Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies

Suvir Kaul

In the series Postcolonial Literary Studies

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780748634569

Overview
Contents

About this book

'This book convincingly challenges both the extremely short historical memory of most postcolonial work and the all-too-insularly English world still conjured by period specialists. Hogarthian whores and Grub Street hacks, coffee houses and fashionable pastimes, and the burgeoning of print culture all stand revealed as intimately bound to portents of plantation insurgency, agitation for abolition, and the vast fortunes produced by the labouring bodies of the poor, the colonized, and the enslaved. Eighteenth-century studies has never appeared in a more engaged and fascinating light.'

Professor Donna Landry, University of Kent

In this volume Suvir Kaul addresses the relations between literary culture, English commercial and colonial expansion, and the making of 'Great Britain' in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He argues that literary writing played a crucial role in generating the vocabulary of British nationalism, both in inter-national terms and in attempts to realign political and cultural relations between England, Scotland, and Ireland. The formal innovations and practices characteristic of eighteenth-century English literature were often responses to the worlds brought into view by travel writers, merchants, and colonists. Writers (even those suspicious of mercantile and colonial expansion) worked with a growing sense of a 'national literature' whose achievements would provide the cultural capital adequate to global imperial power, and would distinguish Great Britain for its twin success in 'arms and arts'. The book ranges from Davenant's theatre to Smollet's Roderick Random to Phillis Wheatley's poetry to trace the impact of empire on literary creativity.

Key Features

An introduction to the impact of mercantilism and empire on the crafting of eighteenth-century British literature
Encourages students to examine the key formal innovations that define eighteenth-century British literary history as they were produced by writers who redefined their sense of home, nation and the world

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Series Editors’ Preface David Johnson and Ania Loomba Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	viii
Timeline Publicly Available Download PDF	x
Introduction: ‘Towards a Postcolonial History of Eighteenth-century English Literature’ Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. ‘Theatres of Empire’ Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	35
2. ‘The Expanding Frontiers of Prose’ Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	61
3. ‘Imaginative Writing, Intellectual History, and the Horizons of British Literary Culture’ Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	84
4. ‘Perspectives from Elsewhere’ Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	120
Conclusion: ‘Gazing into the Future’ Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	155
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	166
Further Reading Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	181
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	185

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Audience: College/higher education;
Pages
- Main content: 208
Keywords: Literary Studies

eBook

Published: February 25, 2009
ISBN: 9780748634569