FAIR EXOTICS NCS [Hardcover]

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 Exoticsdevelops 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'sRobinson Crusoe, Johnson'sDictionary, De Quincey'sConfessions of an English Opium Eater, and Bronte'sVillette, 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.

Introduction
1 Institutionalizing Xenophobia: Johnson's Project
2 De Quincey and the Topography of Romantic Desire
3 Mothered Identities: Facing the Nation in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft
4 Fair Exotics: Two Case Histories in Frankenstein and Villette
Afterword

Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments

Offers impressive close readings which suggest how literary texts may help to shape dominant national ideologies. —Times Litterary Supplement

Rajani Sudan brilliantly unmasks the xenophobia lurking at the heart of British imperialist culture. Sudan's investigation is original in its attention to how xenophobia, the fear of the foreign, and xenodochy, the entertainment and attempted incorporation of the foreignlS>