Byron and Post-Colonial Criticism: The Eastern Tales

Abstract

In recent years Romantic period studies have been transformed by the application of critical approaches deriving from post-colonial critical perspectives to the writing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. What we describe as the Romantic Movement coincided with the beginnings of a modern British imperialism which involved the governance and exploitation of increasingly large portions of the globe as the nineteenth century wore on. It also involved the conflict with other imperial formations of the time, some expansive and others in decline; European empires such as the French and Russian, and non-European empires such as the Turkish Ottoman Empire and the Qing Empire of China. Romantic writers were not themselves imperialists in the literal sense of the term, though some of them became implicated in the imperial process; Coleridge, for instance, acted as a civil servant for the Governor of Malta, Sir Alexander Ball, and Charles Lamb and Thomas Love Peacock worked for the British East India Company. Many Romantic period writers, the Wordsworths, Coleridge, De Quincey, Austen and so on, had family who were involved in Empire in one way or another, and it certainly impinged on their consciousness as a pressing fact of life. This chapter, however, is concerned with a different sense of imperial involvement.