Race In Nineteenth-Century Literatures And Cultures – serie

Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Cosmologies of the Human traces how lyric personification and anthropomorphic poetics--often regarded as benign or humanizing--have underwritten violent projects of planetary world-building whose consequences persist well into the present day. Through readings of poets and theorists of poetry such as William Wordsworth, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Phillis Wheatley--and of writings on the intersections of race and environment by the Comte de Buffon, Charles Lyell, Robert Knox, and Immanuel Kant--Devin M. Garofalo excavates a Romantic and Victorian verse tradition that renders Earth in the likeness of a purportedly universal but fundamentally white colonial subject.This anthropomorphized Earth, Garofalo argues, finds its aesthetic foundation in nineteenth-century “lyric manscapes”: poetic worlds that fuse ecological feeling with racialized ideas of human difference. Far from opposing environmental harm, these forms often reproduce the very racial logics that animate ecocide itself, even when poets appear to lament environmental loss. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter's work on race, nature, and power, Garofalo complicates simplified narratives of the Anthropocene by demonstrating how human domination is sometimes asserted through, rather than against, the Earth.Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Cosmologies of the Human ultimately calls for direct confrontation with the racialized assumptions embedded in standard practices of reading Romantic and Victorian poetry. In alignment with Wheatley's densely allusive and heterocosmic lyrics, Garofalo advances an unsentimental mode of salvage criticism, testing ambivalence as a readerly disposition attuned to Earth's pluriversal scales and to an interhuman reimagining of nineteenth-century literary studies.

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.