Description
Book SynopsisSounding Imperial offers a more nuanced sense of poetry's unseen role in larger historical processes, emphasizing not just appropriation or collusion but the murky middle range in which most British authors operated during their colonial encounters and the voices that they used to make those cross-cultural encounters seem vivid and alive.
Trade ReviewThis is an excellent book, and one that will appeal not just to lovers of poetry but to historians of the Empire and sociologists who study trans-national influences. -- Clifford Cunningham Sun News Miami Sounding Imperial is a very readable book. It will be mainly of interest to students and scholars of English literature and history. -- Sadhana Naithani Journal of Folklore Research James Mulholland has produced an important new study of eighteenth-century British poetry... -- Evan Gottlieb Review of English Studies James Mulholland's Sounding Imperial: Poetic Voice and the Politics of Empire, 1730-1820 brings the context of British imperialism to Romantic-era poetics, illuminating the concerns of orientalism within the history of print culture. -- Adela Pinch Studies in English Literature What Sounding Imperial tells us about colonialism and culture is that we need to look again at their relationship with fresh eyes. Eighteenth-Century Life
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Global Aesthetics of Poetic Voice
1. Thomas Gray, Virtual Authorship, and the Performed Voice
Authoring Gray's "Elegy"
Performing Gray's "Elegy"
Impersonating the Bard?
Wildness and Welsh Prosody
Quotation Marks
(Un)Editing the Bards
2. Wales, Public Poetry, and the Politics of Collective Voice
Bardic Nationalism Reconsidered
The Aboriginal Aesthetics of Iolo Morganwg
Listening to the Welsh Past
Dead Voices Reanimated
3. Scotland and the Invention of Voice
Primitive Passions, Poetry Addiction, History
Ambiguous Speech
Writing, Re- performance, and Restored Voices
Intimate Hailing
Ossian's Afterlife
4. Impersonating Native Voices in Anglo- Indian Poetry
William Jones and the Fountainhead of Verse
Making the Subaltern Speak
Rewriting Gray's "The Bard" in India
Dislocated Orientalism
Coda: Reading the Archive of the Inauthentic
Notes
Bibliography
Index
