Radical Orientalism: Rights, Reform, and Romanticism

· Cambridge Studies in Romanticism Book 111 · Cambridge University Press
Ebook
453
Pages
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About this ebook

This fascinating study reveals the extent to which the Orientalism of Byron and the Shelleys resonated with the reformist movement of the Romantic era. It documents how and why radicals like Bentham, Cobbett, Carlile, Hone and Wooler, among others in post-Revolutionary Britain, invoked Turkey, North Africa and Mughal India when attacking and seeking to change their government's domestic policies. Examining a broad archive ranging from satires, journalism, tracts, political and economic treatises, and public speeches, to the exotic poetry and fictions of canonical Romanticism, Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud shows that promoting colonization was not Orientalism's sole ideological function. Equally vital was its aesthetic and rhetorical capacity to alienate the people's affection from their rulers and fuel popular opposition to regressive taxation, penal cruelty, police repression, and sexual regulation.

About the author

Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tennessee. He has published articles in English Literary History, Modern Language Quarterly, Studies in Romanticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature, the Dickens Studies Annual, and Differences.

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