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Considering metropolitan and colonial cultural production as a "unitary field of analysis," this book shows how tensions in the 1830s between utilitarian and Romantic perspectives on steam power marked meaningful divisions within the pervasive liberal imperialism of the period and generated divergent speculative fantasies, set in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, about the future of Indian nationalism. Poetry and fiction in Britain and Bengal engage with a Romantic strain of thought and sentiment according to which steam technology represents an anti-utilitarian humanization of nature. Within and against that frame and in uneven and different ways, writers in British India map a constellation of liberal values onto their hopes and fears concerning a future powered by steam.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: Motions and Means.- Chapter 2: A Soul Imparted to Brute Matter; or, the Secret Ministry of Steam.- Chapter 3: Diffusions, Relocations, and the Permeative Process of Coalescence.- Chapter 4: Henry Hurry Goodeve and Dominion Over the Wants of the Universe.- Chapter 5: Henry Meredith Parker and the Miserable Hour of a World's Desolation.
About the author
Daniel E. White is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, Canada. He is the author of
Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (2006) and
From Little London to Little Bengal: Religion, Print, and Modernity in Early British India, 1793-1835 (2013), and co-editor of
Robert Southey: Later Poetical Works, 1811-1838 (2012).
