Brown Romantics

Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century

Manu Samriti Chander

2017
144 pages
ISBN 9781611488210
Transits

Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century proceeds from the conviction that it is high time for the academy in general and scholars of European Romanticism to acknowledge the extensive international impact of Romantic poetry. Chander demonstrates the importance of Romantic notions of authorship to such poets as Henry Derozio (India), Egbert Martin (Guyana), and Henry Lawson (Australia), using the work of these poets, each prominent in the national cultural of his own country, to explain the crucial role that the Romantic myth of the poet qua legislator plays in the development of nationalist movements across the globe. The first study of its kind, Brown Romantics examines how each of these authors develops poetic means of negotiating such key issues as colonialism, immigration, race, and ethnicity.

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Reviews
"Brown Romantics reminds us of the imperative to read outwards, valuing the cosmopolitan and the hybrid, and seeking 'new constellations of poets' to trouble both canonicity and what Chander terms the 'fantasy of coherent national identity' (p. 112)." - Romantic Textualities, Winter 2021

"Identifying ... new literary cultures is the ambition of Manu Samriti Chander's Brown Romantics ...[one] of the most important recent books published in Romanticism studies. The authors and publics ... introduce[d] and the methods ... use[d] to organize them should have profound consequences for how Romanticism defines itself as a field."
-In European Romantic Review, February 2021

"Brown Romantics challenges readers to rethink the play of race, religion, class, and nation across the nineteenth-century globe. Chander adroitly critiques the disabling rhetoric of nationalism as it confronts the democratic ideals undergirding each of the three poets he studies."
-Victorian Studies, Winter 2019, 61.2

About the author:

Manu Samriti Chander is assistant professor of English at Rutgers University.

Distributed by Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

Paperback: 9781611488234; eBook: 9781611488227