Fair Exotics: Xenophobic Subjects in English Literature, 172-185 (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780812236569)

Arguing that the major hallmarks of Romantic literature--inwardness, emphasis on subjectivity, the individual authorship of selves and texts--were forged during the Enlightenment, Rajani Sudan traces the connections between literary sensibility and British encounters with those persons, ideas, and territories that lay uneasily beyond the national border. The urge to colonize and discover embraced both an interest in foreign "fair exotics" and a deeply rooted sense of their otherness.

Fair Exotics develops a revisionist reading of the period of the British Enlightenment and Romanticism, an age during which England was most aggressively building its empire. By looking at canonical texts, including Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Johnson's Dictionary, De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and Bronte's Villette, Sudan shows how the imaginative subject is based on a sense of exoticism created by a pervasive fear of what is foreign. Indeed, as Sudan clarifies, xenophobia is the underpinning not only of nationalism and imperialism but of Romantic subjectivity as well.

Author: Rajani Sudan
ISBN-10: 0812236564
ISBN-13: 9780812236569
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Language: English
Published: 07/02/2002
Pages: 208
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.20w x 0.90d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 12/01/2002 pg. 635