The great Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley had a complicated relationship with the British Empire and the culture of colonialism. Considered politically radical and scandalous in Britain, Shelley lived in self-imposed exile and set much of his writing in foreign places. In Strange Truths in Undiscovered Lands Nahoko Miyamoto Alvey examines the ways in which Shelley developed a 'Romantic geography' to provide visionary alternatives to an earth devastated by a new type of European colonialism and global expansion. Intertextually rich, Alvey's work establishes the context in which poems by Shelley and other Romantics were written by presenting relevant histories, travel texts, scientific writings, and archival material, and are all complemented by postcolonial analysis. Unique in its emphasis on the optimistic and positive aspects of Shelley's poetical works, Strange Truths in Undiscovered Lands offers a different perspective on Romantic Orientalism, and a new look at how the poet imagined the relationship between the Self and the Other. Thorough and original, this book will be of interest to Romanticists, postcolonialists, and anyone interested in alternative responses to acts of colonialism and empire.

Essays on aspects of English literature from Chaucer to Henry James, with special focus on the Romantics.

Why are material objects so prominent in European Romantic literature, both as symbol and organizing device? This collection of essays maintains that European Romantic culture and its aesthetic artifacts were fundamentally shaped by "object aesthetics," an artistic idiom of acknowledging, through a profound and often disruptive use of objects, the movement of Western aesthetic practice into Romantic self-projection and imagination. Of course Romanticism, in all its dissonance and anxiety, is marked by a number of new artistic practices, all of which make up a new aesthetics, accounting for the dialectical and symbolistic view of literature that began in the late eighteenth century. Romanticism and the Object adds to our understanding of that aesthetics by reexamining a wide range of texts in order to discover how the use of objects works in the literature of the time.

By establishing a relationship between Shelley's works and the Gothic tradition, this study offers a new way of approaching the center of Shelley's thought. Consideration of Shelley's application of the Gothic mode as an agency for psychological analysis is preceded by a brief introduction to Gothic sensibility.

The selections from 132 authors in this anthology represent gender, social class, and racial and national origin as inclusively as possible, providing both greater context for canonical works and a sense of the era’s richness and diversity. In terms of genre, poetry, non-fiction prose, philosophy, educational writing, and prose fiction are included. Geographically, America, Canada, Australia, India, and Africa are represented along with Britain, emphasizing Romantic literature as a world literature. Biographical headnotes, explanatory footnotes, and an extensive bibliography clarify and illuminate the texts for readers.