Sounding Imperial

Poetic Voice and the Politics of Empire, 1730–1820

Inbunden, Engelska, 2013

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In "Sounding Imperial", James Mulholland offers a new assessment of the origins, evolution, and importance of poetic voice in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By examining a series of literary experiments in which authors imitated oral voices and impersonated foreign speakers, Mulholland uncovers an innovative global aesthetics of poetic voice that arose as authors invented new ways of crafting textual voices and appealing to readers. As poets drew on cultural forms from around Great Britain and across the globe, impersonating "primitive" speakers and reviving ancient oral performances (or fictionalizing them in verse), they invigorated English poetry. Mulholland situates these experiments with oral voices and foreign speakers within the wider context of British nationalism at home and colonial expansion overseas. "Sounding Imperial" traces this global aesthetic by reading texts from canonical authors like Thomas Gray, James Macpherson, and Felicia Hemans together with lesser-known writers, like Welsh antiquarians, Anglo-Indian poets of colonialism, and impersonators of Pacific islanders.The frenetic borrowing, movement, and adaptation of verse of this time offers a powerful analytic by which scholars can understand anew poetry's role in the formation of national culture and the exercise of colonial power. "Sounding Imperial" offers a more nuanced sense of poetry's unseen role in larger historical processes, emphasizing not just appropriation or collusion but the murky middle range in which most British authors operated during their colonial encounters and the voices that they used to make those cross-cultural encounters seem vivid and alive.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2013-09-24
Mått152 x 229 x 21 mm
Vikt454 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor232
FörlagJohns Hopkins University Press
ISBN9781421408545

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Litteraturvetenskap inom Skönlitteratur

List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Global Aesthetics of Poetic Voice1. Thomas Gray, Virtual Authorship, and the Performed VoiceAuthoring Gray's "Elegy"Performing Gray's "Elegy"Impersonating the Bard?Wildness and Welsh ProsodyQuotation Marks(Un)Editing the Bards2. Wales, Public Poetry, and the Politics of Collective VoiceBardic Nationalism ReconsideredThe Aboriginal Aesthetics of Iolo MorganwgListening to the Welsh PastDead Voices Reanimated3. Scotland and the Invention of VoicePrimitive Passions, Poetry Addiction, HistoryAmbiguous SpeechWriting, Re- performance, and Restored VoicesIntimate HailingOssian's Afterlife4. Impersonating Native Voices in Anglo- Indian PoetryWilliam Jones and the Fountainhead of VerseMaking the Subaltern SpeakRewriting Gray's "The Bard" in IndiaDislocated OrientalismCoda: Reading the Archive of the InauthenticNotesBibliographyIndex

This is an excellent book, and one that will appeal not just to lovers of poetry but to historians of the Empire and sociologists who study trans-national influences. -- Clifford Cunningham Sun News Miami Sounding Imperial is a very readable book. It will be mainly of interest to students and scholars of English literature and history. -- Sadhana Naithani Journal of Folklore Research James Mulholland has produced an important new study of eighteenth-century British poetry... -- Evan Gottlieb Review of English Studies James Mulholland's Sounding Imperial: Poetic Voice and the Politics of Empire, 1730-1820 brings the context of British imperialism to Romantic-era poetics, illuminating the concerns of orientalism within the history of print culture. -- Adela Pinch Studies in English Literature What Sounding Imperial tells us about colonialism and culture is that we need to look again at their relationship with fresh eyes. Eighteenth-Century Life