Romanticism and Aesthetic Life in Postcolonial Writing

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-viii

   PDF

2. Chapter 1: Romanticism and Postcolonial Writing: Living Thoughts, Breathing Worlds

   • Philip Dickinson

   Pages 1-28

3. Chapter 2: Walcott, Wordsworth, and the Extinction of Sense

   • Philip Dickinson

   Pages 29-74

4. Chapter 3: Dis-Enclosure: Landscape, Lyric Form, and The Enigma of Arrival

   • Philip Dickinson

   Pages 75-124

5. Chapter 4: White Writing and the Regime of the Sensory

   • Philip Dickinson

   Pages 125-161

6. Chapter 5: Spivak’s Imagination

   • Philip Dickinson

   Pages 163-184

7. Back Matter

   Pages 185-200

   PDF

This book explores Romanticism as a force that exerts an insistent but critically neglected pressure on the postcolonial imagination. From the decolonizing poetics of the Caribbean to the white writing of South Africa, from the aesthetics of post-imperial disappointment to postcolonial theory itself, it develops an account of the textual and philosophical interpenetration of postcolonial aesthetics with Romantic ideas about sense, history and world.


What emerges is a reading of Romantic/postcolonial co-involvement that moves beyond well-worn models of intercanonical antagonism and the historicizing biases of conventional literary history. Caught somewhere between the effects of reanimation and estrangement, Romanticism appears here not as a stable textual repository prior to the postcolonial, but as echo, spectre, self-interruption, or vital force, that can yet only emerge in the guise of the afterlife, its agency mediated — but never exhausted — by postcolonial writing.

• J. M. Coetzee
• Gayatri Spivak
• Jamaica Kincaid
• Derek Walcott
• George Lamming
• V. S. Naipaul
• Anita Desai

“Radically reimagining the relation between romanticism and postcolonialism, this consistently original and elegantly-written study shows how postcolonial writing draws on a surprisingly congenial romantic aesthetic of failure, disappointment, and otherness. Effortlessly ranging across the domains of poetry, the novel, and theory, the book enriches our understanding of postcolonial writing even as it demonstrates the resilience of a romantic aesthetic that continues to inspire its own critique—and, this book shows, its unfinished literary afterlives.” (Pieter Vermeulen, author of Geoffrey Hartman: Romanticism After the Holocaust)

“In Romanticism and Aesthetic Life in Postcolonial Writing, Philip Dickinson seeks to understand how, and why, a certain “institution of feeling” comes into being within British Romanticism, persists as an afterlife within the intertextual contact zone, takes up occupation within an oppositional imagination, and in the process enables other, and paradoxically new, ways of voicing postcolonialism’s perseverate call for meaningful social change. The radical heterogeneity of postcolonial writing will never submit to definitional singularity. But this monograph demonstrates just how literary criticism that brings precision to that heterogeneity can still have sweep.” (Stephen Slemon, University of Alberta, Canada)

• Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom

  Philip Dickinson

Philip Dickinson is Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies and World Literature at Lancaster University, UK.

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