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WiSe 20/21: V-Lit. Stud.: Periods-Genres-Concepts: Romanticism and the East

Jennifer Wawrzinek

Comments

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, East Asian imports into Britain (porcelain, silk, lacquerware, spices, saltpetre, tea and opium) all generated a fascination for the mysterious and faraway lands of the East. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the European vogue for chinoiserie(a decorative style inspired by East Asian and Chinese artistic traditions) was paralleled by a similar fascination for Oriental tales, pseudo-ethnographies, sexual fantasies and political satires. Yet this obsession with the East was more than mere exoticism. In recent years, some scholars have even argued that the emergence of Western modernity can be seen as an outcome of European contact with the East. They have suggested that the long eighteenth century, because prior to the development of imperialisms, was a period of genuine curiosity and admiration for other lands and cultures such as China. This course will examine works by British Romantic writers who variously imagine, engage with and negotiate cultures, lands and peoples from the East. Through an examination of Coleridge’s Eastern fables, Percy Shelley’s evocations of the Indian muse, Byron’s oriental romances, Mary Shelley’s depictions of otherness and De Quincey’s unsettling encounter with the Malay, students will interrogate the extent to which these tales, romances and musings are reflective of open engagement and productive influence, and to what extent they can be seen as attempts to control and subjugate an unsettling otherness.

A course reader will be made available on Blackboard prior to semester.