Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs

Nineteenth-century periodicals frequently compared themselves to the imperialpowers then dissecting the globe, and this interest in imperialism can be seen in the exotic motifsthat surfaced in works by such late Romantic authors as John Keats, Charles Lamb, James Hogg,Letitia Landon, and Lord Byron. Karen Fang explores the collaboration of these authors withperiodical magazines to show how an interdependent relationship between these visual themes andrhetorical style enabled these authors to model their writing on the imperialproject.Fang argues that in the decades after Waterloo late Romanticauthors used imperial culture to capitalize on the contemporary explosion of periodical magazines. This proliferation of ",post-Napoleonic", writing-often referencing exoticlocales-both revises longstanding notions about literary orientalism and reveals a remarkablesynthesis of Romantic idealism with contemporary cultural materialism that heretofore has not beenexplored. Indeed, in interlocking case studies that span the reach of British conquest, ranging fromGreece, China, and Egypt to Italy and Tahiti, Fang challenges a major convention of periodicalpublication. While periodicals are usually thought to be defined by time, this account of thegeographic attention exerted by late Romantic authors shows them to be equally concerned withspace.With its exploration of magazines and imperialism as a context forRomantic writing, culture, and aesthetics, this book will appeal not only to scholars of bookhistory and reading cultures but also to those of nineteenth-century British writing andhistory.