Michael J. Franklin's Romantic Representations of British India is a timely study of the impact of Orientalist knowledge upon British culture during the Romantic period. The subject of the book is not so much India, but the British cultural understanding of India, particularly between 1750 and 1850. Franklin opens up new areas of investigation in Romantic-period culture, as those texts previously located in the ghetto of ‘Anglo-Indian writing’ are restored to a central place in the wider field of Romanticism. The essays within this collection cover a wide range of topics and are written by an impressive troupe of contributors including P.J. Marshall, Anne Mellor, and Nigel Leask. Students and academics involved with literary studies and history will find this book extremely useful, though musicologists and historians of science and of religion will also make good use of the book, as will those interested in questions of gender, race, and colonialism.
Author(s): Michael J. Franklin
Edition: 1
Year: 2006
Language: English
Pages: 304
Book Cover......Page 1
Half-Title......Page 2
Series Title......Page 3
Title......Page 4
Copyright......Page 5
Dedications......Page 6
Contents......Page 8
List of Figures......Page 10
Contributors......Page 11
Acknowledgements......Page 14
1. General introduction and [meta]historical background [re]presenting ‘The palanquins of state; or, broken leaves in a Mughal garden’......Page 16
2. British-Indian connections c.1780 to c.1830: The empire of the officials......Page 60
3. Torrents, flames and the education of desire: Battling Hindu superstition on the London stage......Page 80
4. Between mimesis and alterity: Art gift and diplomacy in colonial India......Page 99
5. Poetic flowers/Indian bowers......Page 128
6. ‘Where...success [is] certain’?: Southey the literary East Indiaman......Page 146
7. Radically feminizing India: Phebe Gibbes’s Hartly House, Calcutta (1789) and Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary: An Indian Tale (1811)......Page 169
8. The strains of empire: Shelley and the music of India......Page 195
9. From ‘very acute and plausible’ to ‘curiously misinterpreted’: Sir William Jones’s ‘On the Musical Modes of the Hindus’ (1792) and its reception in later musical treatises......Page 212
10. ‘Travelling the other way’: The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan (1810) and Romantic Orientalism......Page 235
11. Conquest narratives: Romanticism, Orientalism and intertextuality in the Indian writings of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Orme......Page 253
12. Orientalism and religion in the Romantic era: Rammohan Ray’s Vedanta(s)......Page 274
Index......Page 293
