British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, Series Number 2)

by Nigel Leask

The recent turn to political and historical readings of Romanticism has given us a more complex picture of the institutional, cultural and sexual politics of the period. There has been a tendency, however, to confine such study to the European scene. In this book, Nigel Leask sets out to study the work of Byron, Shelley and De Quincey (together with a number of other major and minor Romantic writers, including Robert Southey and Tom Moore) in relation to Britain's imperial designs on the 'Orient'. Combining historical and theoretical approaches with detailed analyses of specific works, it examines the anxieties and instabilities of Romantic representations of the Ottoman Empire, India, China and the Far East. It argues that these anxieties were not marginal but central to the major concerns of British Romantic writers. The book is illustrated with a number of engravings from the period, giving a visual dimension to the discussion of Romantic representations of the East.

284 pages, Paperback

First published February 26, 1993

About the author

Nigel Leask is Regius Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow. He is an internationally recognised scholar who has published widely on British and especially Scottish romantic literature and culture, with a special emphasis on empire, orientalism, travel writing and 'improvement'. His Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland won the Saltire Prize for the best research monograph in 2010. his edition of Robert Burns's Commonplace Books, Tour Journals and Miscelaneous Prose, the first volume of the AHRC funded Oxford Edition of Robert Burns's Writings, was published in 2014. He was CI of the AHRC funded 'Curious Travellers: Thomas Pennant and the Welsh and Scottish Tour, 1750 - 1820' (2014 - 18). He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a Vice-President of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies.