Description
Book SynopsisWhen the Scottish poet Thomas Pringle emigrated to the Cape Colony in 1820 he voyaged also into a new creative life and an art responsive to his colonial home, “sterner verse” for “darker scenes”. Accompanying him to the Cape, the sonnet became his most consistent choice for capturing his experiences and convictions, his personal crises and the greater trauma of colonial appropriation and racial oppression. In this study his unique contribution to the Romantic-era sonnet is for the first time given its full due, through readings that are as attentive to form and formal agency as to the cultural, social and historical conditions in which they are enmeshed. Moving beyond colonial theory to consider issues of literary migration, this illuminating work shows how Pringle effectively opened up a radical conversation between the habitual modes of perception and response of British Romanticism and his new, southern world.
Table of ContentsPreface List of Illustrations Chronology of Thomas Pringle’s Life and Works Introduction The Cabin and the Sonnet 1 Edinburgh Sonnets In the Walks of British Literature 2 Sonnets of Passage Darker Scenes, Sterner Verse 3 Cape Sonnets: In Genadendal Short Solace in Narrow Rooms 4 Cape Sonnets: On the Frontier Friendship’s Golden Chain 5 London Sonnets The Sympathy of Strangers Conclusion A Romanticism of the South Appendix 1: The Complete Sonnets of Thomas Pringle Appendix 2: Pringle’s Sonnet Types Appendix 3: Pringle’s “Selection of Sonnets, Songs & Other Poems – Chiefly from the Works of Living Authors” (1814) Bibliography Index
