Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Fair Exotics: Xenophobic Subjects in English Literature, 172-185

Fair Exotics: Xenophobic Subjects in English Literature, 172-185

Sudan, Rajani

Hardcover

Series: New Cultural Studies

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 0812236564
ISBN13: 9780812236569
Publisher: Univ Of Pennsylvania Pr
Published: Jul 2 2002
Pages: 208
Weight: 1.05
Height: 0.90 Width: 6.20 Depth: 9.10
Language: English

Arguing that the major hallmarks of Romantic literature--inwardness, emphasis on subjectivity, the individual authorship of selves and texts--were forged during the Enlightenment, Rajani Sudan traces the connections between literary sensibility and British encounters with those persons, ideas, and territories that lay uneasily beyond the national border. The urge to colonize and discover embraced both an interest in foreign fair exotics and a deeply rooted sense of their otherness.

Fair Exotics develops a revisionist reading of the period of the British Enlightenment and Romanticism, an age during which England was most aggressively building its empire. By looking at canonical texts, including Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Johnson's Dictionary, De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and Bronte's Villette, Sudan shows how the imaginative subject is based on a sense of exoticism created by a pervasive fear of what is foreign. Indeed, as Sudan clarifies, xenophobia is the underpinning not only of nationalism and imperialism but of Romantic subjectivity as well.

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