Literary representations of the East and other deployments of Orientalism signal an unprecedented shift in poetics and aesthetics during the Romantic period. This shift in orientation was in many ways a turn to the poetic self over the other. This turn to the self valorized the individual poet and the rhetoric of universal experience. It was in tension, however, with the rise of new literary forms, Orientalism, comparativism, and increasingly “global” frames of reference. Through these tensions, the Romantic period saw the rise of Western individualism and a white-male-dominant poetic tradition. This tradition forged a modern lyric subject reliant on and in contrast to the Oriental other. Through Orientalist difference, the Romantic poet became themself—a subject of world-facing, cosmopolitan, white associations. By foregrounding expression over imitation, newness over tradition, heterogeneity over uniformity, and hemispheres over national borders, British Romantic writers expressed and reimagined themselves, taking routes through a literary “Orient”—a fictive space of cultural, political, sexual, and religious differences postured as “Oriental” forms.

As translator, colonial judge, and poet, Sir William Jones occupies a broad, paradoxical framework of Orientalist interests and influence on the authors in this study. His public role as a judge and imperial representative in colonial India, and his eventual defense of the first “Governor-General of Bengal,” Warren Hastings, situate Jones as an unlikely progenitor of Romantic expressive theory. Not only law, but Jones was also a polyglot and philologist dedicated to the study of twenty-eight different languages throughout his life. After he moved to India to serve as a judge, he founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal and started the journal Asiatic Researches, creating lasting scholarly interest in what he called “Indology” and non-Western social sciences. After his death, the five editions of his works published between 1799 and 1810 show his significance and popularity, but only recently has Jones's impact on the literature and literary history of this period been acknowledged.