Abstract
In this chapter, I investigate the pioneering of a new Romantic genre that, in the hands of Byron and Scott, would become one of the most popular of the era. The colonial romance—the verse narrative that told a story of love and hate between colonizer and colonized in a country undergoing imperial conquest—was a cousin of the Oriental tales that I examined in the second chapter, but was much more clearly related to contemporary power struggles across the globe. Scott’s Vision of Don Roderick (1811), for example, used the eighth-century conflict for control of Spain to allegorize the Peninsular War between Napoleonic France and the allied forces of the Spanish resistance and of Britain. Byron’s The Giaour (1813) set a love story between a Christian and a Muslim in the Greek islands, long the possession of Venice and coveted by the Turks and currently the object of both French and Russian/Ottoman ambition. “The Island” (1823), meanwhile, portrayed the recently discovered Tahiti, setting the love of an island girl and a mutineer from the Bounty against the colonial order imposed by the British navy.
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Notes
On these see David Fairer, Organising Poetry: The Coleridge Circle, 1790–1798 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 99–100, 131–33, 169–70, 241–43.
See Anthea Morrison, “Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Greek Prize Ode on the Slave Trade,” in An Infinite Complexity: Essays in Romanticism, ed. J. R. Watson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983), p. 147
Tim May, “Coleridge’s Slave Trade Ode and Bowles’s ‘The African,’” NampampQ , 54 (December 2007), 504–9.
The Morning Post , June 6, 1799; The Times , June 6, 1799, quoted in Joseph W. Donohue, Dramatic Character in the English Romantic Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 138.
See Gentleman’s Magazine , 75.1 (January 1805), 57–59; Monthly Review , 51 (November 1806), 325; J. S. Mill’s review of Lettre aux Espagnols-Americains, par un de leurs compatriots, Edinburgh Review , 13 (1809), 277–311.
See Karen Racine, Francisco de Miranda A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution (Wilmington: University of Delaware Press, 2003), pp. 178–79.
Giovanni Ignazio Molina, The Geographical and Natural History of Chili , 2 vols. (London, 1809).
William Lisle Bowles, A Wiltshire Parson and His Friends. The Correspondence of W. L. Bowles, ed. Garland Greever (London: Constable, 1926), p. 142.
See Robert Harvey, Liberators: South America’s Savage Wars of Freedom 1810–30 (London: Constable and Robinson, 2002), p. 339.
See C. J. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 1780–1830 (London and New York: Longman, 1989), p. 140 for a discussion of the rise of missionary societies at this point.
Quoted in John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions 1808–1826, 2nd ed. (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1987), p. 155.
See Stephen E. Lewis, “Myth and the History of Chile’s Araucanians,” Radical History Review , 58 (1994), 112–41 (pp. 137ff.).
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© 2015 Tim Fulford
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Fulford, T. (2015). Positioning The Missionary: Poetic Circles and the Development of Colonial Romance. In: Romantic Poetry and Literary Coteries. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137518897_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137518897_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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