Examines how Indigenous figures used British Romantic poetry in their interactions with settler governments and publics.

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indigenous peoples in North America and the Pacific engaged with the latest and most fashionable British Romantic poetry as part of transcontinental and transoceanic cross-cultural negotiations about sovereignty, treaty rights, and land claims. In Sensitive Negotiations, Nikki Hessell uses examples from North America, Africa, and the Pacific to show how these Indigenous figures quoted lines from famous poets like Lord Byron and Felicia Hemans to build sympathy and community with their audience. Hessell makes new connections by setting aside European-derived genre barriers to bring literary studies to bear on the study of diplomacy and scholarship from diplomatic history and Indigenous studies to bear on literary criticism. By connecting British Romantic poetry with Indigenous diplomatic texts, artefacts, and rituals, Hessell reimagines poetry as diplomatic and diplomacy as poetic.

The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English brings together essays that respond to consequential cultural and socio-economic changes that followed the expansion of the British Empire from the British Isles across the Atlantic. Scholars track the cumulative power of the slave trade, settlements and plantations, and the continual warfare that reshaped lives in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Importantly, they also analyze the ways these histories reshaped class and social relations, scientific inquiry and invention, philosophies of personhood, and cultural and intellectual production. As European nations fought each other for territories and trade routes, dispossessing and enslaving Indigenous and Black people, the observations of travellers, naturalists, and colonists helped consolidate racism and racial differentiation, as well as the philosophical justifications of “civilizational” differences that became the hallmarks of intellectual life. Essays in this volume address key shifts in disciplinary practices even as they examine the past, looking forward to and modeling a rethinking of our scholarly and pedagogic practices. This volume is an essential text for academics, researchers, and students researching eighteenth-century literature, history, and culture.

Two centuries after Percy Shelley's death, his writings still resonate with pressing societal issues. This collection explores Shelley's remarkable collaboration with audiences across spaces and times. This title is part of the Flip it Open programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

This instalment in the Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition series concerns a decade that was as technologically transitional as it was eventful on a global scale. It collects work from a group of internationally renowned scholars across disciplinary boundaries in order to engage with the wide array of cultural developments that defined the 1830s. Often overlooked as a boundary between the Romantic and Victorian periods, this decade was, the book proposes, the central pivot of the nineteenth century. Far from a time of peaceful reform, it was marked by violent colonial expansion, political resistance, and revolutionary technologies such as the photograph, the expansion of steam power, and the railway that changed the world irreversibly. Contributors explore a flurry of cultural forms to take the pulse of the decade, from Silver Fork fiction to lithography, from working-class periodicals to photographs, and from urban sketches to magazine fiction.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This collection brings together for the first time literary studies of British colonies in nineteenth-century Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific Islands. Drawing on hemispheric studies, Indigenous studies, and southern theory to decentre British and other European metropoles, the collection offers a groundbreaking challenge to national paradigms and traditional literary periodisations and canons by prioritising southern cultural networks in multiple regional centres from Cape Town to Dunedin. Worlding the south examines the dialectics of literary worldedness in ways that recognise inequalities of power, textual and material violence, and literary and cultural resistance. The collection revises current literary histories of the ‘British world’ by arguing for the distinctiveness of settler colonialism in the southern hemisphere, and by incorporating Indigenous, diasporic, and south-south perspectives.

In this revisionist account of romantic-era poetry and language philosophy, Tristram Wolff recovers vibrant ways of thinking language and nature together. Wolff argues that well-known writers including Phillis Wheatley Peters, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Henry David Thoreau offer a radical chronopolitics in reaction to the "uprooted word," or the formal analytic used to classify languages in progressive time according to a primitivist timeline of history and a hierarchy of civilization. Before the bad naturalisms of nineteenth-century race science could harden language into place as a metric of social difference, poets and thinkers try to soften, thicken, deepen, and dissolve it. This naturalizing tendency makes language more difficult to uproot from its active formation in the lives of its speakers. And its "gray romanticism" simultaneously gives language different kinds of time—most strikingly, the deep time of geologic form—to forestall the hardening of time into progress. Reorienting romantic studies to consider colonialism's pervasive effects on theories of language origin, Wolff shows us the ambivalent position of romantics in this history. His reparative reading makes visible language's ability to reimagine social forms.

This book considers indigenous-language translations of Romantic texts in the British colonies. It argues that these translations uncover a latent discourse around colonisation in the original English texts. Focusing on poems by William Wordsworth, John Keats, Felicia Hemans, and Robert Burns, and on Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, it provides the first scholarly insight into the reception of major Romantic authors in indigenous languages, and makes a major contribution to the study of global Romanticism and its colonial heritage. The book demonstrates the ways in which colonial controversies around prayer, song, hospitality, naming, mapping, architecture, and medicine are drawn out by translators to make connections between Romantic literature, its preoccupations, and debates in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial worlds.

London in the middle of the 1800s was a subject endlessly sketched by artists, studied by social reformers, and discussed by writers. This comprehensive collection of drawings by Gustave Dor,̌ France's most celebrated graphic artist of the period, presents a panoramic portrait of that engrossing city - from fashionable ladies riding in a sunlit park to ragged wretches in a shadowy side street. Here are amazingly perceptive sketches of workaday London, busy market places, the Christy Minstrels, a waterman's family, thieves gambling, the Devils' Acre in Westminster, flower girls, waifs and strays, a wedding at the Abbey, provincials in search of lodgings, a garden party, prisoners in the Newgate exercise yard, stalls at Covent Garden Opera House, and many other scenes that capture the London of a bygone era.

Looking at decolonization in the conditional tense, this volume teases out the complex and uncertain ends of British and French empire in Africa during the period of ‘late colonial shift’ after 1945. Rather than view decolonization as an inevitable process, the contributors together explore the crucial historical moments in which change was negotiated, compromises were made, and debates were staged. Three core themes guide the analysis: development, contingency and entanglement. The chapters consider the ways in which decolonization was governed and moderated by concerns about development and profit. A complementary focus on contingency allows deeper consideration of how colonial powers planned for ‘colonial futures’, and how divergent voices greeted the end of empire. Thinking about entanglements likewise stresses both the connections that existed between the British and French empires in Africa, and those that endured beyond the formal transfer of power.