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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.
List of contents
- General Introduction and [Meta]historical Background [re]presenting 1
‘The Palanquins of State; or, Broken Leaves in a Mughal Garden’
- British-Indian Connections c. 1780 to c. 1830: The Empire of the Officials
Peter Marshall
- Torrents, Flames and the Education of Desire: Battling Hindu Superstition
on the London Stage
Daniel O'Quinn
- Between Mimesis and Alterity: Art Gift and Diplomacy in Colonial India 150
Natasha Eaton
- Poetic Flowers/Indian Bowers
Tim Fulford
- ‘Where … success is certain’? Southey the literary East Indiaman’
Lynda Pratt,
- Radically Feminizing India: Phebe Gibbes’s Hartly House, Calcutta (1789)
and Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary: An Indian Tale (1811)
Michael J. Franklin
- Imperial Strains: Shelley and Music
Tilar Mazzeo
- ‘Very acute and plausible’: The Reception of Sir William Jones’s
‘On the Musical Modes of the Hindus’ (1792)
Bennett Zon
- ‘Traveling the Other Way’: The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan (1810)
and Romantic Orientalism
Nigel Leask
- Orientalism, Militarism and Romanticism: Writing and Rewriting
the History of the British Conquest of India
Douglas Peers
- Orientalism and Religion in the Romantic Period:
Rammohun Ray’s Vedanta(s)
Amit Ray
About the author
Michael J Franklin
Summary
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.
Additional text
'At the heart of this excellent collection of eclectic essays is the idea that there was no European monopoly on the representation of India... This book suggests that every representation is a misrepresentation, and the difficulty in capturing the British-Indian encounter over the length of the British occupation of the vast and multi-faceted subcontinent ensures the truth of that statement...This book provides an intriguing collection of disaparate specialised views on the British-Indian relationship between 1780 and 1850.' - David O'Shaughnessy, The Review of English Studies
