British Romanticism in Asia

Alex Watson is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory at Nagoya University, Japan, and the author of Romantic Marginality: Nation and Empire on the Borders of the Page (2012). Laurence Williams is Associate Professor of English at Sophia University, Japan. He holds a DPhil from Oxford and has previously held Canadian Commonwealth and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science research fellowships.

• Introduction.- British Romanticism in Asia, 1820–1950: Modernity, Tradition, and Transformation in India and East Asia.- Section I: Romanticism in Asia: Cross-Cultural Networks.- The News from India: Emma Roberts and the Construction of Late Romanticism.- Flora Japonica: Linnaean Connections Between Britain and Japan During the Romantic Period.- An ‘Exot’ Teacher of Romanticism in Japan: Lafcadio Hearn and the Literature of the Ghostly.- On William Empson’s Romantic Legacy in China.- Section II: Colonialism and Resistance.- Romanticism in Colonial Korea: Coterie Literary Journals and the Emergence of Modern Poetry in the Early 1920s.- "Truth in Beauty and Beauty in Truth": Rabindranath Tagore’s Appropriation of John Keats’ "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (1819).- Romantic, Rebel, and Reactionary:  The Metamorphosis of Byron in Twentieth-Century China.- Section III: Nature, Aesthetics, and Translation.- Nature and the Natural: Translating Wordsworth’s "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" (1807/15) into Chinese.- "With Sidewise Crab-Walk Western Writing": Tradition and Modernity in Shimazaki Tōson and Natsume Sōseki.- Of Ponds, Lakes, and the Sea: Shōyō, Shakespeare, and Romanticism.- Section IV: Bodies and the Cosmos.- Nogami Yaeko’s Adaptations of Austen Novels: Allegorising Women’s Bodies.- The Romantic Skylark in Taiwanese Literature: Shelleyan Religious Scepticism in Xu Zhimo and Yang Mu.- A Japanese Blake: Embodied Visions in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) and Tezuka Osamu’s Phoenix (1967–88).- "Rouse up O Young Men of the New Age!": Ōe Kenzaburō and William Blake on bodies, biopolitics, and the imagination.

“For Romanticists working in Asia, or dealing with the international impact of Romanticism, it will be essential reading.” (David Chandler, Essays in English Romanticism, Vol. 44, 2020)