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Asian Romanticism: Construction of the Comparable

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Part of the book series: Asia-Pacific and Literature in English ((APLE))

Abstract

The Afterword assesses whether British Romanticism should now be regarded as necessarily complicit in the imperial project, and as such a legacy to be repudiated. While study of the English literary canon was undeniably implicated in colonial rule, this inheritance retains a forward-directed and emancipatory potential. In an Asian context, there is no equivalent to the developmental sequence of Romanticism as followed by Victorian, Modernist and Post-Modern periods, or to the hermeneutics of suspicion directed against its supposed ideological bias, evident in Deconstruction, New Historicism and Post-Colonialism in the Western academy. Drawing on the theories of Paul Ricœur, this chapter argues that the process of translation inevitably involves diminution and loss, perhaps nostalgia and servility, but it may also be regarded as allowing an openness to alterity as a salutary end in itself.

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Clark, S. (2019). Asian Romanticism: Construction of the Comparable. In: Watson, A., Williams, L. (eds) British Romanticism in Asia. Asia-Pacific and Literature in English. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3001-8_16

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