Description
Book SynopsisThis book addresses the relations between literary culture, English commercial and colonial expansion, and the making of 'Great Britain' in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Trade ReviewThis book addresses the relations between literary culture, English commercial and colonial expansion, and the making of 'Great Britain' in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This book convincingly challenges both the extremely short historical memory of most postcolonial work and the all too-insularly English world still conjured by period specialists. Hogarthian whores and Grub Street hacks, coffee houses and fashionable pastimes, and the burgeoning of print culture all stand revealed as intimately bound to portents of plantation insurgency, agitation for abolition, and the vast fortunes produced by the labouring bodies of the poor, the colonized, and the enslaved. Eighteenth-century studies has never appeared in a more engaged and fascinating light. -- Professor Donna Landry, University of Kent Kaul succeeds well in his project to situate literary production within the context of the international mercantile anxieties of nation and economy in the long eighteenth century... This is a very valuable and erudite work, short in length but rich in scope and content, beneficial for scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates alike, that serves as a good compendium of sources for further reading and research. The focus on the extratextual mercantile and colonialist phenomena can help dissuade readers from celebrating the meanings of literary texts and encourage them, instead, to reflect upon the forces, not readily evident, that produce those meanings. -- Thomas Paul Bonfiglio, University of Richmond College Literature This book convincingly challenges both the extremely short historical memory of most postcolonial work and the all too-insularly English world still conjured by period specialists. Hogarthian whores and Grub Street hacks, coffee houses and fashionable pastimes, and the burgeoning of print culture all stand revealed as intimately bound to portents of plantation insurgency, agitation for abolition, and the vast fortunes produced by the labouring bodies of the poor, the colonized, and the enslaved. Eighteenth-century studies has never appeared in a more engaged and fascinating light. Kaul succeeds well in his project to situate literary production within the context of the international mercantile anxieties of nation and economy in the long eighteenth century... This is a very valuable and erudite work, short in length but rich in scope and content, beneficial for scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates alike, that serves as a good compendium of sources for further reading and research. The focus on the extratextual mercantile and colonialist phenomena can help dissuade readers from celebrating the meanings of literary texts and encourage them, instead, to reflect upon the forces, not readily evident, that produce those meanings.
Table of ContentsTimeline; Introduction: Towards a Postcolonial History of Eighteenth-century English Literature; Postcolonial Studies and Empire today; Nation-formation and empire in the eighteenth century; Territory, trade routes, war and "Great Britain"; Print and Public Culture; Literary Creativity, Literary Criticism, Postcolonial Criticism; Plan of the Book; Chapter 1: Theaters of empire; Davenant, the revival of performance, and the thematics of empire; Aphra Behn, colonial self-making, and the uncertain consolations of romance; Civil tragedy, commercial humanism, and colonial consciousness; Chapter 2: The expanding frontiers of prose; Yariko and Inkle and the staging of polite culture; Crusoe the merchant-adventurer-and Friday; Chapter 3: Imaginative writing, intellectual history, and the horizons of British literary culture; The Spectator, print culture, and the circulation of inter-national value; The languages of national difference: becoming Roderick Random; Luxury, Commercial Society, Enlightenment historiography; Chapter 4: Perspectives from Elsewhere; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her Turkish Embassy Letters; Johnson's Rasselas: philosophy in an "oriental" key; Phillis Wheatley: literacy, poetry, and slavery; Ukawsaw Gronniosaw: writing in another voice; Conclusion: Gazing into the Future; Literary transport: to India and the South Seas; Bibliography; Further Reading; Index.
