Casie LeGette – författare

By tracing the enormous influence of nineteenth-century poetry published in schoolbooks from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, this book dramatizes Romantic poetry's impact on education, on literary history, and on generations of readers. The Empire's Schoolbooks analyses these schoolroom poems while also considering the work of twentieth-century Caribbean writers, who were responding to their own experiences in the colonial classroom. Books like Thomas Nelson & Sons' Royal Readers, though designed for British children, spread widely, circulating across the empire in the millions. Children in Britain and children in the Caribbean were all reading the same poems in the same textbooks. Poems and schoolbooks alike live exceedingly long lives. Old books persisted, preserving and maintaining nineteenth-century ideas about race, poetry, and empire long into the twentieth century. Poems were transformed by their inclusion in these schoolbooks; in selecting, excerpting, arranging, and reframing the poems they included, editors powerfully shaped the meaning of those poems. Educators and editors turned repeatedly to particular poems, crafting them into pedagogical tools designed to instil in children, among other things, an appreciation of white, British superiority. They put nineteenth-century poems to use, as they constructed a literary canon in service of the imperial project. The writing of Caribbean poets, responding to their colonial education, demonstrates both the reach and the limits of that education. These poets challenged and transformed their poetic inheritance, adapting and deploying the techniques of British poetry for their own ends.

This book shows that the publishers and editors of the radical press deployed Romantic-era texts for their own political ends—and for their largely working-class readership—long after those works’ original publication. It examines how the literature of the British Romantic period was excerpted and reprinted in radical political papers in Britain in the nineteenth century. The agents of this story were bound by neither the chronological march of literary history, nor by the original form of the literary texts they reprinted. Godwin’s Caleb Williams and poems by Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, and Shelley appear throughout this book as they appeared in the nineteenth century, in bits and pieces. Radical publishers and editors carefully and purposefully excerpted the works of their recent past, excavating useful political claims from the midst of less amenable texts, and remaking texts and authors alike in the process.

This book shows that the publishers and editors of the radical press deployed Romantic-era texts for their own political ends—and for their largely working-class readership—long after those works’ original publication. It examines how the literature of the British Romantic period was excerpted and reprinted in radical political papers in Britain in the nineteenth century. The agents of this story were bound by neither the chronological march of literary history, nor by the original form of the literary texts they reprinted. Godwin’s Caleb Williams and poems by Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, and Shelley appear throughout this book as they appeared in the nineteenth century, in bits and pieces. Radical publishers and editors carefully and purposefully excerpted the works of their recent past, excavating useful political claims from the midst of less amenable texts, and remaking texts and authors alike in the process.