1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910462619103321

Autore

Sudan Rajani

Titolo

Fair exotics [[electronic resource] ] : xenophobic subjects in English literature, 1720-1850 / / Rajani Sudan

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Philadelphia, : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2002

ISBN

0-8122-0376-3

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (208 pages)

Collana

[New cultural studies]

Disciplina

820.9/1

Soggetti

English literature - 18th century - History and criticism

Exoticism in literature

English literature - 19th century - History and criticism

Xenophobia - Great Britain - History - 18th century

Xenophobia - Great Britain - History - 19th century

Foreign countries in literature

Noncitizens in literature

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Series statement on jacket.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [181]-188) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- 1. Institutionalizing Xenophobia: Johnson's Project -- 2. De Quincey and the Topography of Romantic Desire -- 3. Mothered Identities: Facing the Nation in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft -- 4. Fair Exotics: Two Case Histories in Frankenstein and Villette -- Afterword -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index -- Acknowledgments

Sommario/riassunto

Arguing that the major hallmarks of Romantic literature-inwardness, emphasis on subjectivity, the individual authorship of selves and texts-were forged during the Enlightenment, Rajani Sudan traces the connections between literary sensibility and British encounters with those persons, ideas, and territories that lay uneasily beyond the national border. The urge to colonize and discover embraced both an interest in foreign "fair exotics" and a deeply rooted sense of their otherness.Fair Exotics develops a revisionist reading of the period of the British Enlightenment and Romanticism, an age during which England was most aggressively building its empire. By looking at



canonical texts, including Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Johnson's Dictionary, De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and Bronte's Villette, Sudan shows how the imaginative subject is based on a sense of exoticism created by a pervasive fear of what is foreign. Indeed, as Sudan clarifies, xenophobia is the underpinning not only of nationalism and imperialism but of Romantic subjectivity as well.