Romantic Literature and the Colonised World

Abstract

Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print features work that does not fit comfortably within established boundaries -whether between periods or between disciplines. Uniquely, it combines efforts to engage the power and materiality of print with explorations of gender, race, and class. By attending as well to intersections of literature with the visual arts, medicine, law, and science, the series enables a largescale rethinking of the origins of modernity.

Global Romanticism: Out of bounds in the transnational 19th century

“…As Nikki Hessell says, the translocal accounts for a text that is “local” to one place at one time becoming equally “local” to readers in a completely different place and time. By inspiring “creative interpretations of space and time,” translocalism makes it possible to fully comprehend “Romanticism's reach into the colonized world” (Hessell, 2018, p. 13). Hessell's Romantic Literature and the Colonized World: Lessons from Indigenous Translations connects Romantic writings to their indigenous translations, finding translations that seize on the political relevance of their originals in times and places far from 19th‐century Britain.…”

“…In fundamental ways, our epistemologies are shaped by institutional boundaries that few of us actively choose, but many of us passively reproduce. As Hessell (2018) acknowledges with regards to her work, the decision to write primarily for readers from her own cultural background is “based on an awareness of my own limitations, and the community to and for which I have the right to speak” (p. 11). She is right to point to her limitations as a white scholar and Pakeha New Zealander, but her book on Indigenous Romanticism showcases her efforts to change the location of those limitations, in her case by hiring scholars to produce the translations that she wanted to study.…”

“…In Romantic Literature and the Colonized World , Hessell argues that Indigenous translators of Romantic writers were not guided straightforwardly by either anglophobia or anglophilia 11 . They acknowledged deep affection for the Romantics—why translate them otherwise?—and this affection coexists with the translations' “political edge,” the fact that many translators turned to Romantic poetry in moments of local political urgency as if to insist that Ivanhoe was not just about medieval England (Hessell, 2018, p. 13). Hessell refers to this as the translators' “cultural ambidexterity,” a term borrowed from Vinay Dharwadker (1997, p. 123) to describe thinkers who operate outside a binary of resistance and complicity.…”

“…Hessell (2018), whose book follows the second path I outlined, is typically thoughtful in addressing the “profoundly limited linguistic, cultural, and methodological competencies of those of us who teach Romantic literature in Western universities” (p. 7). She worked with indigenous experts and linguists to produce English translations of indigenous translations that she could then compare to the originals.…”

“…She paid for this work, and presented it jointly with the translators when possible. She focused not on English‐language appropriations of indigenous writing, but on the reverse, aiming to “provide a degree of space for indigenous voices to speak within the context of contemporary scholarship about colonization and Romantic literature” (Hessell, 2018, p. 9). Scholarship on Romanticisms beyond English may make more visible the linguistic diversity and complex fissures within English, on display in Jason Rudy's Imagined Homelands , for example, which examines Scottish dialect poetry that spread to emigrant communities around the world (2017).…”