Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Romanticism and colonialism: texts, contexts, issues
- 2 Romanticism and colonialism: races, places, peoples, 1785–1800
- 3 Romanticism and colonialism: races, places, peoples, 1800–1830
- 4 Accessing India: Orientalism, anti-‘Indianism’ and the rhetoric of Jones and Burke
- 5 ‘Sunshine and Shady Groves’: what Blake's ‘Little Black Boy’ learned from African writers
- 6 Blood Sugar
- 7 ‘Wisely forgetful’: Coleridge and the politics of Pantisocracy
- 8 Darkness visible? Race and representation in Bristol abolitionist poetry, 1770–1810
- 9 Fictional constructions of Liberated Africans: Mary Butt Sherwood
- 10 ‘Wandering through Eblis’; absorption and containment in Romantic exoticism
- 11 The Isle of Devils: The Jamaican journal of M. G. Lewis
- 12 Indian Jugglers: Hazlitt, Romantic Orientalism, and the difference of view
- 13 ‘Some samples of the finest Orientalism’: Byronic Philhellenism and proto-Zionism at the time of the Congress of Vienna
- 14 ‘Once did she hold the gorgeous East in fee…’: Byron's Venice and Oriental Empire
- 15 The plague of imperial desire: Montesquieu, Gibbon, Brougham, and Mary Shelley's The Last Man
- Index
13 - ‘Some samples of the finest Orientalism’: Byronic Philhellenism and proto-Zionism at the time of the Congress of Vienna
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Romanticism and colonialism: texts, contexts, issues
- 2 Romanticism and colonialism: races, places, peoples, 1785–1800
- 3 Romanticism and colonialism: races, places, peoples, 1800–1830
- 4 Accessing India: Orientalism, anti-‘Indianism’ and the rhetoric of Jones and Burke
- 5 ‘Sunshine and Shady Groves’: what Blake's ‘Little Black Boy’ learned from African writers
- 6 Blood Sugar
- 7 ‘Wisely forgetful’: Coleridge and the politics of Pantisocracy
- 8 Darkness visible? Race and representation in Bristol abolitionist poetry, 1770–1810
- 9 Fictional constructions of Liberated Africans: Mary Butt Sherwood
- 10 ‘Wandering through Eblis’; absorption and containment in Romantic exoticism
- 11 The Isle of Devils: The Jamaican journal of M. G. Lewis
- 12 Indian Jugglers: Hazlitt, Romantic Orientalism, and the difference of view
- 13 ‘Some samples of the finest Orientalism’: Byronic Philhellenism and proto-Zionism at the time of the Congress of Vienna
- 14 ‘Once did she hold the gorgeous East in fee…’: Byron's Venice and Oriental Empire
- 15 The plague of imperial desire: Montesquieu, Gibbon, Brougham, and Mary Shelley's The Last Man
- Index
Summary
Oh that I had the art of easy writing
What should be easy reading! could I scale
Parnassus, where the Muses sit inditing
Those pretty poems never known to fail,
How quickly would I print (the world delighting)
A Grecian, Syrian, or Assyrian tale;
And sell you, mix'd with western sentimentalism,
Some samples of the finest Orientalism!
Byron, Beppo, 51Taking their cue from self-mockery such as this, critics wanting to debunk the romantic image of the poet who gave his life for the Greek revolution of 1824 have often portrayed Byron as a selfpromoting purveyor of fashionable Orientalist fantasy, who cynically stuck to the East as ‘the only poetical policy’. Of course, Byron's self-conscious deconstruction of his own Romantic Orientalism prefigured modern scepticism like Edward Said's famous definition of Orientalism as ‘the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient’ operating as a Western style for ‘dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’. But as Byron also consistently denounced imperialism throughout his verse, he has proved a trickier writer to fit into the binary model of Said's thesis than government polemicists like Byron's bête noire, Robert Southey. The Poet Laureate expressed a low opinion of both western Orientalists and the Indian and the middle-eastern literature which they studied in notes to his verse romances on the Eastern mythology and stylistic motifs he had utilized. The Utilitarians of the next generation would go much further.
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- Information
- Romanticism and ColonialismWriting and Empire, 1780–1830, pp. 221 - 242Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998
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