In the Wake of the Novel: The Oriental Tale as National Allegory

Aravamudan, Srinivas

doi:10.2307/1346025

Cited by 44 publications

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“…By conjuring up for his readers the quintessentially Oriental panorama of a camel winding its way across the blazing desert sands, Irwin indicates his refusal to focus exclusively on the locale that, nominally at least, constitutes the subject of the poem. His poem, instead, aspires towards the status of an encyclopaedia, as it were, and it strives to incorporate within itself everything that was likely to interest those readers who had a penchant for the dimly glimpsed yet marvellous Orient depicted in the phenomenally popular contemporary Oriental tales (Aravamudan, 1999, p. 11). It, naturally, luxuriates in the strangeness and fecundity of the tropical, or broadly Oriental, natural world.…”

Section: Familiar Poetic Codes and The Description Of Unfamiliar (Ind...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Importing Arcadia into 18th‐century Madras: Poetics of the contact zone and the politics of genre in Eyles Irwin's Saint Thomas's Mount

Motwani

2023

Literature Compass

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Eyles Irwin (1751–1817), an East India Company official who spent much of his life in the British settlement of Fort St. George, Madras, was one of the earliest practitioners of anglophone belles lettres in the Indian subcontinent, and his writings predate the development of a robust culture of English‐language literary composition in the colony by quite a few years. The scant scholarly attention he has received belies his importance as an anticipator of the momentous literary‐historical processes that would transform India's public sphere in the 19th century. This essay offers a contextual reading of Saint Thomas's Mount (1774), his earliest extant poem, which is avowedly modelled on canonical English topographical poems like Alexander Pope's Windsor‐Forest (1713) and makes use of a host of neoclassical conventions, but which also differs from them in terms of the kind of landscape that is represented (Irwin's is a tropical landscape, with abundant mangoes, palms, and Oriental fauna, unlike Pope's pleasant, idyllic British park). However, Irwin's target readership being chiefly metropolitan, he contends with the difficulty of highlighting India's irreducible foreignness while simultaneously trying to ensure that readers in London do not find the Oriental descriptions too alien, incredible, and unrelatable. The authorial strategies he adopts to navigate this difficulty constitute the focus of the first part of the essay. The second (and final) part seeks to shed light on his hybrid, hyphenated identity as an Indian‐born Irish poet, and on his perception of himself as somehow fundamentally unlike those Britons who never ventured beyond the geographical confines of Europe, let alone setting down roots in places on the very fringes of the British empire. The affiliative bonds he forges with expatriate colonial officials living in and confronting the hardships of life in the monsoonal tropics mark him as a member of the steadily growing community of Anglo‐Indians in the Indian subcontinent. While noting the shifting connotations of the term ‘Anglo‐Indian’ in the 18th and 19th centuries, this essay will also examine the implications of identifying Irwin as a member of this initially amorphous but steadily growing community.

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Section: Familiar Poetic Codes and The Description Of Unfamiliar (Ind...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Importing Arcadia into 18th‐century Madras: Poetics of the contact zone and the politics of genre in Eyles Irwin's Saint Thomas's Mount

Motwani

2023

Literature Compass

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“…The work of Srinivas Aravamudan has been crucial in addressing the relationship between empire, nationalism, and literary form. In Enlightenment Orientalism and elsewhere, Aravamudan treats representations of “the Orient” and the genre of the “oriental tale” as tropes helpful for appreciating the importance of the non‐European (and later colonial) understandings of Europe. To re‐claim “the Orient” and “the Oriental” in this sense has been to re‐claim an alternative history of canonical literature and with it a different historiography of the relationship between Europe and Asia.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Tropicopolitans provides a compelling explanation for the way dilemmas between faithful and unfaithful representations remain a double bind whose goal is to avoid politicizing the “Orient” and the “Oriental” text. Aravamudan examines Orientalist tropes in a broad range of orientalist literature (Aphra Behn's Oroonoko , Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Captain Singleton , Joseph Addison's Cato , Jonathan Swift's Gulliver ' s Travels and The Drapier ' s Letters , Samuel Johnson's Rasselas , William Beckford's Vathek , Lady Mary Montagu's travel letters, Olaudah Equiano's autobiography, Edmund Burke's political and aesthetic writings, and Abbé de Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes ), not for what the texts reveal or conceal of the Eastern world but for their function as sites of anticolonial agency. Aravamudan's term “tropicopolitans” names “residents of the tropics subjected to the politics of colonial tropology, who correspondingly seize agency through contesting language, space, and the language of space that typifies justifications of colonialism” (6), who are “troublesome tropes that—and colonial subjects who—interrupt the monologue of nationalist literary history” (12).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Instead of organizing her study by genre, she considers three locations, the Persian and Ottoman seraglios, the Chinese court, and the treasures of India, each indicating a mode of interaction with the East. Much like Aravamudan, Ballaster treats these representations as performative rather than referential, focusing on the ways in which these “narratives moved” from East to West and by doing so, “moved” political, social, cultural, philosophical, and sexual boundaries in England.…”

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Eighteenth‐Century Orientalism in Contemporary British Historiography and Literary Criticism

Gallien

Jokic

2015

Literature Compass

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To speak about orientalism now is to explain the persistent concern, among academic and non‐academic readers and writers alike, with the transformative effect of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978). Said's text has been taken as a challenge by historians of society and of literature alike. To these scholars, the book offered a vast new field of inquiry into the relationship between European and colonial history, between cultural production and capitalism, and between Enlightenment idealism and the politics of domination. Orientalism was also a particular model of interpretive methodology, which repurposed Orientalism, once a term for cultural appreciation and interest, to name a relationship of mistrust, abuse, and control. We show in this essay that Said's argument about the inextricable ties between Europe and its colonial domains has been so deeply absorbed as an intellectual, ethical, and political imperative that no serious scholarship is now imaginable that remains unaware of imperialism as a formative element of European history and culture. As a model of interpretive methodology, Said's work has been subjected to some of the most poignant and compelling criticisms, especially by contemporary British historiography and literary criticism working on the eighteenth‐century period and whose purpose and effect have been to expand and improve the examination and understanding of imperialism and the enduring practices and implications of imperial culture. What has perplexed eighteenth‐century scholars and then encouraged them to take up the question of Orientalism was the fact that Said largely omitted periods prior to Bonaparte's expedition in Egypt in 1798 and provided a monolithic and hegemonic version of Orientalism as discursive formation, transportable and translatable to any given time and place. Scholars of the eighteenth‐century period, and more particularly, given the scope of Said's research, those working in the fields of the history of empire and in literary criticism, have been keen to respond to the Orientalist challenge. This allowed them not only to embrace the Saidian perspective and revisit the corpus of eighteenth‐century literature through the Orientalist prism but also, at a second stage perhaps, to refine and adapt the concept of Orientalism to time and place specifics and display a more anxious history of empire. The re‐reading of European textual materials with an eye to Orientalism has been (and continues to be) enabling of historicist understandings of literary representation and its potentially collusive relationship with the histories of colonialism. Developments in colonial historiography and related fields such as historical anthropology have made possible new insights into the relationship between eighteenth‐century English literature and empire. Orientalism also provided an analytical frame to think about matters related to the construction of tropes, the transformation of Eastern texts as they traveled across countries and continents, the promotion and demotion of genres, ...

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The Novel: Novels in the World of Moving Goods

Lynch¹

2005

A Concise Companion to the Restoration and Eighteenth Century

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In the Wake of the Novel: The Oriental Tale as National Allegory

Cited by 44 publications

References 22 publications

Importing Arcadia into 18th‐century Madras: Poetics of the contact zone and the politics of genre in Eyles Irwin's Saint Thomas's Mount

Importing Arcadia into 18th‐century Madras: Poetics of the contact zone and the politics of genre in Eyles Irwin's Saint Thomas's Mount

Eighteenth‐Century Orientalism in Contemporary British Historiography and Literary Criticism

The Novel: Novels in the World of Moving Goods

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