Echoes of Old Empires

Lauren Rule Maxwell’s Romantic Revisions in Novels from the Americas examines a group of disparate twentieth-century novels and the dialogue these texts have with the “Big Six” of British Romanticism (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and Keats). Despite the geographical, historical, and social variations in the novels chosen, the author suggests that they share an engagement with Romantic poetry as a way of exploring the legacy of British colonialism. The texts are Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy (1990), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), and Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock (1960).

In analyzing these texts as examples of post-colonial literature, Maxwell takes the accepted position of post-colonial scholars that language and systems of representation insure colonial power far more than acts of imperial military conquest. By tracing the manner in which the selected novels engage with canonical texts and create a counter-discourse, exposing and dismantling the structures of power represented by them, Maxwell argues that “British Romantic poetry—with its revolution of poetic form and remapping of landscape as a site of political reflection—provides these authors with a common language with which they can scrutinize institutions of power that were inscribed during British colonialism” (3). Such a project could employ a vast number of British canonical texts to engage with issues surrounding colonialism and its aftermath; the extensive work on The Tempest (c. 1611) and Caliban, in particular, springs to mind. However, Maxwell explains in some detail her selection of Romantic texts and her reasons are manifold. First, the revolutionary nature of Romantic poetry both in practice and theory; second, in Maxwell’s words, Romantic poetry’s “preoccupation with individualism, the ordinary and the outcast”; third, its use of landscape as a place of reflection; and finally, the simultaneous emergence of Romanticism and the beginnings of the British Empire.

Maxwell also explains her selection of twentieth-century novels rather than poetry to explore the continued influence of British Romanticism. She argues that it is the novel that has been most widely used to retell colonial history and misrepresentation. She writes convincingly that:

By appropriating and manipulating genres within their narratives, postcolonial novelists mimic the ways in which colonial educators and historians have appropriated various forms of literature, such as Romantic poetry, and incorporated them into a larger colonial rhetoric that abstracts and substantiates cultural domination.

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Viewing Romanticism through the prism of post-colonialism may lead some readers to question the use of texts from the U.S. as they reject the idea that the political, cultural, and financial dominance of the U.S. can be considered alongside former British colonies that did not become global superpowers. The U.S. does not share the marginalized position of previously colonized countries. Maxwell accepts this argument but convincingly argues that viewing the U.S. in this light provides an invaluable tool in analyzing and understanding the manner in which it has copied and absorbed colonial discourse in its own position as a neo-imperialistic power.

It is from this position that Maxwell approaches The Great Gatsby, exploring the cost of establishing a U.S. empire in terms of the social, the economic, and the political. With reference to a number of Fitzgerald’s works (“May Day” [1920], “Echoes of the Jazz Age” [1931], and the Crack-Up trilogy [1936]), she uncovers the way in which Fitzgerald uses something apparently trivial—men’s clothing—as a symbol of consumerism, to engage with the shift of power from Britain to her former colony, the U.S., after World War I and how that power, although changing places, remained the same. The detail with which Fitzgerald concerns himself with the dress of Gatsby is famously presented in the shirt scene, and Maxwell traces the echoes of Keats’s “The Eve of St Agnes” (1820) at this point in the novel. The author is not the first critic to note the influence...