Fair exotics : xenophobic subjects in English literature, 1720-1850 / Rajani Sudan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sudan, Rajani.

Series:

New Cultural Studies

[New cultural studies]

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--18th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

Exoticism in literature.

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.

Xenophobia--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Xenophobia.

Xenophobia--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Foreign countries in literature.

Noncitizens in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (208 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2002.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Arguing that the major hallmarks of Romantic literature-inwardness, emphasis on subjectivity, the individual authorship of selves and texts-were forged during the Enlightenment, Rajani Sudan traces the connections between literary sensibility and British encounters with those persons, ideas, and territories that lay uneasily beyond the national border. The urge to colonize and discover embraced both an interest in foreign "fair exotics" and a deeply rooted sense of their otherness. Fair Exotics develops a revisionist reading of the period of the British Enlightenment and Romanticism, an age during which England was most aggressively building its empire. By looking at canonical texts, including Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Johnson's Dictionary, De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and Bronte's Villette, Sudan shows how the imaginative subject is based on a sense of exoticism created by a pervasive fear of what is foreign. Indeed, as Sudan clarifies, xenophobia is the underpinning not only of nationalism and imperialism but of Romantic subjectivity as well.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Introduction

1. Institutionalizing Xenophobia: Johnson's Project

2. De Quincey and the Topography of Romantic Desire

3. Mothered Identities: Facing the Nation in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft

4. Fair Exotics: Two Case Histories in Frankenstein and Villette

Afterword

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Series statement on jacket.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [181]-188) and index.

ISBN:

0-8122-0376-3

OCLC:

859161731