In a fresh investigation of primary sources and original readings, Kitson traces the origins of contemporary ideas about race though a variety of late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth century literary texts by Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, De Quincey, and other published and unpublished writings about travel and exploration and natural history.

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Reviews

'This, then, is an enlightening but saddening study of humanity's continuing struggle to comprehend and accept otherness. It adds much to our understanding of the Romantic period and to our grasp of many of the attitudes which still bedevil our relationships with our fellow men.' - Jeff Branch, The Use of English

'One of the strengths of Peter J. Kitson's important study...is that, while giving slavery and abolition due importance, it ranges far beyond them...Kitson's approach throughout is careful and circumspect, and he brings out the complexity and ambivalence of representations of race, as well as showing an awareness of the difficulties of relating colonial practice to metropolitan theory...[it is] the most wide-ranging and authoritative study available of the construction of race in the Romantic period.' British Association for Romantic Studies

About the author

PETER J. KITSON is Professor of English at the University of Dundee, UK.

Bibliographic Information

Book Title: Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter
Authors: Peter J. Kitson
Series Title: Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10920-0
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan New York
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies Collection, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Nature America Inc. 2007
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4039-7645-1Published: 11 March 2008
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-10920-0Published: 30 April 2016
Series ISSN: 2691-1256
Series E-ISSN: 2634-5218
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 269
Topics: Literary Theory, Cultural Theory, British and Irish Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Eighteenth-Century Literature, Early Modern/Renaissance Literature

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Table of contents (7 chapters)

Front Matter

Introduction

The Race Idea and the Romantics: Coleridge and De Quincey

Romantic Anatomies of Race: The New Comparative Anatomy and the Case of Victor Frankenstein

“Candid Reflections:” The Idea of Race in the Debate over the Slave Trade and Slavery in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

Romanticism, Race, and Cannibalism in the “South Seas”

Romantic Sinopolitans: Natural Philosophers, Travelers, Diplomats, and Missionaries

Tartars, Monguls, Manchus, and Chinese

Back Matter

About this book