British Women Writers and the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1785-1835

Bluestocking Studies 2011–2017: The Transnational Turn

“…Sydney Owenson and Mariana Starke, for example, do not further the Asiatic Society of Bengal's interpretations of India – which in a detached, dualist mode of Orientalist scholarship supported the imperial project – but instead they inscribe an epistemology sympathetic to Vedic nondualism. Further, they see the “feminized nondualism” echoed in the poetry of William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Shelley as potentially able “to dismantle the repressive patriarchal structures of the late Enlightenment” (Freeman 131). Analyzing a different colonial setting, Cathy Rex in Anglo‐American Women Writers and Representations of Indianness, 1629–1824 explains how European female authors functionalized depictions of Native Americans to posit their own identity independent of masculinist control.…”