Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (review)

Suvir Kaul seeks to interpret the literary culture of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and Britain as an archive of texts for analyzing the connections between the idea of a national English literature, nation formation, and the making of the British Empire. He begins his enterprise by reminding the reader of the gestures of the celebration of Augustan Rome in early modern England, which evoked a "coincidence of arts and arms that was to define imperial civilizations," and which also "embodied an inheritance claimed by many historically-literate Britons" (2009, 5). Here, the reader is reminded that the interest in Roman Britain would indicate more than just a neutral gesture of archaeological curiosity, but would reflect as well, England's own fascination with the idea of empire. Of particular importance for Kaul's perspective is the immense influence of the travel accounts of the eighteenth century, which he sees as informing almost all academic debates in law, religion, biology, and poetics. He sees the mercantile geopolitical interests of the period, especially in agonistic relationship to France, Spain, and the Netherlands, along with the consolidation of England and Scotland, as formative of British national sentiment and subjectivity. It was from this context that the idea of "English literature" was first formally constructed; British expansionism affected "all manner of imaginative writing" of the period (26), and travelogues supplied much of the information for that writing.

The book is organized into an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion. Chapter One, "Theaters of Empire," concentrates largely on William Davenant's The History of Sir Francis Drake and The Siege of Rhodes and Aphra Behn's The Widdow Ranter. Chapter Two, "The Expanding Frontiers of Prose," concentrates principally on Richard Steele's 1711 account of the tale of Yariko and Inkle in The Spectator and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Chapter Three, "Imaginative Writing, Intellectual History, and the Horizons of British Literary Culture," concentrates heavily on the power of print culture, especially in The Spectator, and also illuminates Tobias Smollet's Roderick Random. Chapter Four, "Perspectives from Elsewhere," studies Wortley Montagu's letters on Turkey and Samuel Johnson's Rasselas, along with Phillis Wheatley's poems and Ukawsaw Gronniosaw's memoirs. There are excursions into other texts along the way.

Kaul reads Sir Francis Drake in the context of Cromwell's consolidation of English power in Scotland and Ireland and his plan to challenge Spanish power in the Caribbean; hence the novel's suggestion of "a continuity of English sea power" and its representation of Spanish colonial authority as "heartless and rapacious" (37). And Dryden's Amboyna, or the Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants is read in the context of the Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674). A less evident, and thus more interesting reading of Aphra Behn's The Widdow Ranter sees the absence of the governor of Virginia in the play as a displacement of the crisis of legitimate authority in the wake of the Stuart monarchy, a reading that illustrates "the novelty of colonial lives, and their uncertain connection with England" (50), along with the fact that, during this period, "the state of the nation was now contingent upon the state of the empire" (57). The composite of these readings shows that "the very idea of Britishness" had become "insistently comparative, internationalist, and increasingly imperialist" (63).

Kaul's analyses of the role of print culture, especially of the periodical The Spectator, are especially successful in illustrating the overlapping of "travel narratives, ethnography, and philosophy" (84) in the construction of imperialist culture. Periodicals such as The Spectator were often unquestioned sources of information on myriad geopolitical and ethnographic issues; they informed contemporary literary discourse and themselves reflected the values and anxieties of the urban (upper) middle classes. And some of the international issues are quite close to home: his reading of Smollett's Roderick Random illustrates "a new Scoto-British subject" (96), along with "the anti-Scots prejudice that defined the cultural...