Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834 (review)

Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834, ed. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996. 352 pp. ISBN 0-253-33212-5 cloth.

Until very recently, little sustained scholarly attention has been given the significant relationship between English Romantic literature and British imperialism. Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780-1830 responds admirably to this absence in Romantic studies. Building on the work of John Barrell, Nigel Leask, Marlon Ross, Gauri Viswananthan, and others, and drawing on postcolonial theory and historicist criticism, Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture convincingly demonstrates how British expansionism shaped the output of Romantic writers whose works advanced and/or resisted ideas, attitudes, and values supportive of Empire.

Distributed over three sections, the thirteen essays cover a broad spectrum of concerns, yet identify common critical and theoretical issues that place them in a productive dialogue with each other. The first section, "Race, Gender, and the Romantic Construction of English National Identity," demonstrates how English subjectivities were fashioned in the context of the macropolitical realities of nation and empire. In elaborating gender distinctions sustaining the English national imaginary, it considers the extent to which women writers, as oppressed subjects, contested or replicated "hegemonic discursive models of nationalism, race, xenophobia, and imperialism" (86). The second section, "Imperial Fictions: Romantic Others, Other Romantics," argues that in constructing "other" peoples and places--the "Orient," Africa, America, and their inhabitants--Romantic writers fashioned personal and political identities for themselves and their readers, and negotiated problematic national and cultural issues through surrogate representations. Finally, in studying the specific relation of British imperialism to Romantic writing and writing systems, the third section, "Resituating Romanticism," unsettles conventional understandings of the English Romantic tradition and makes the case for re-assessing it in light of imperial culture.

Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture is an informed, theoretically savvy collection of essays that usefully indicates areas for further research in a still underdeveloped, undertheorized field of study. Delivering on its promise to unsettle simple oppositions, and sensitive to the processes of transculturation and hybridization, the collection reinforces the editors' view that "the periphery defines the imperial metropolis no less than the metropolis seeks to delimit and control the peripheries" (7). It also unsettles distinctions between "major" and "minor" writers, "canonical" and "non-canonical" literature, and "literary" and "extra-literary" texts by focusing on the output of less-known figures--Hannah Kilham, Helen Maria Williams, and Mungo Park, for example--and less-studied genres: the political tract, the bilingual text, the travelogue. The collection also may unsettle readers used to distinguishing "Enlightenment" and "Romantic" literature; in-depth analyses of Burke, Wollstonecraft, Equiano, and others disrupt familiar periodization and, at times, beg the question of what exactly constitutes "Romantic" literature and whether the term is a helpful designation at all.

Finally, the essays in this collection resist simplistic or reductionist accounts of the workings of imperial culture, focusing instead on the ambivalences, uncertainties, and polyvalences of texts riven by complex, often competing ideologies and subject positions. They are particularly strong in considering the impact of gender on Romantic writing systems. The volume's one disappointment in terms of its advertisement is its relatively slight treatment of race and racist ideologies subtending colonial rule and imperial culture; excepting Laura Doyle's piece, these remain minor subtextual matters. Overall, however, Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture conveys useful information and demonstrates sound scholarship in covering a lot of terrain. Knowledgeable, critically aware, and often thought-provoking, it will b e welcome by Romanticists and students of colonial/imperial culture alike.

Lawrence Needham

Lawrence Needham is an affiliate scholar at Oberlin College in Ohio and specializes in the rhetoric(s) of Romanticism and the impact of expansionism/colonialism on English Romantic literautre.

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