Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies

Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies
Suvir Kaul
'Introducing for the first time the preoccupations of Postcolonial studies in dialogue with a revisionist literary history of eighteenth-century Britain, 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.'
- Donna Landry, Professor of English and American Literature, University of Kent
This book argues that eighteenth-century British writing must be analysed in relation to Britain's mercantile and territorial expansion. Great Britain was forged in battle against European competitors and resistant native populations overseas, and literary writing, as well as travelogues, newspapers, and periodicals confirmed that British readers lived in a world being reshaped by the experience of overseas travel, trade, and settlement. Plays, novels and poems are analysed in order to demonstrate how innovations in literary form and genre were driven by the imaginative need to manage the challenging experiences of the Empire. The book also argues that postcolonial modes of cultural analysis are best suited to produce literary histories adequate to the world-creating ambition of British writers in this period.
Suvir Kaul is A. M. Rosenthal Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.

Timeline; 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.