Romantic Literature and the Colonised World

This book considers indigenous-language translations of Romantic texts in the British colonies. It argues that these translations uncover a latent discourse around colonisation in the original English texts. Focusing on poems by William Wordsworth, John Keats, Felicia Hemans, and Robert Burns, and on Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, it provides the first scholarly insight into the reception of major Romantic authors in indigenous languages, and makes a major contribution to the study of global Romanticism and its colonial heritage. The book demonstrates the ways in which colonial controversies around prayer, song, hospitality, naming, mapping, architecture, and medicine are drawn out by translators to make connections between Romantic literature, its preoccupations, and debates in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial worlds.

• Global Romanticism
• Ocean
• Felicia Hemans
• Translation
• Robert Burns
• Wordsworth
• Romantic literature
• Indigenous writing

“This book will find enthusiastic readers and responses among scholars of British Romanticism, print history, and eighteenth- and nineteenth century cultural history. Beyond research, teaching one or several of 144 Reviews the case studies alongside the anglophone texts they concern would be a wonderful exercise for any undergraduate classroom. As suggested above too, there is much for translation studies scholars here … evacuate some of the technical specificity that translators may desire.” (Daniel DeWispelare, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 34 (1), 2021)

“They indicate important changes not only in what we read, but why we write, and how we are meant to craft an intellectual inheritance for the future. Composing a new literary history of empire will require meticulous archival work among unglamorous authors who are still largely unknown within the Anglo-American academy, but it is toward such efforts that these two books point the way.” (James Mulholland, European Romantic Review, Vol. 32 (1), February, 2021)

“This is the most interesting book I have read in some time. … The book is also essential reading for anyone interested in the reception of Romantic literature in Hawaii or what is now the Indian state of Kerala. … Romantic Literature and the Colonised World makes an excellent starting point for scholars of postcolonial literature by showing the ‘empire writing back’, in its own languages, during the long struggle to maintain Indigenous cultures in the face of imperial repression.” (Olivia Murphy, The Journal of New Zealand Studies, JNZS, Issue 30, 2020)

• Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

  Nikki Hessell

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