Reading Places: Local Landscapes and Imperial Culture in Romantic Britain

Reading Places: Local Landscapes and Imperial Culture in Romantic Britain examines a literary topos in which a subject reads a rural British place as a material record encoding a long and complex history. It asks how and why Romantic landscape descriptions register the influence of the burgeoning British Empire. I challenge longstanding critical tendencies to see European literatures circa 1800 as suffused by emerging national consciousness and to understand nineteenth-century British cultural theory as predominantly idealist, preoccupied with establishing an authentic, autochthonous national identity. Instead, I contribute to recent critical movements that understand “national” literary traditions through post-nationalist frameworks by recovering a materialist and internationally minded approach to theorizing culture that took shape in Britain over the course of the long nineteenth century./nReading Places opens by reconsidering the familiar argument that eighteenth-century locodescriptive poetry, featuring a picturesque aesthetic undergirded by emerging liberal ideology, nourished Romantic-era preoccupations with natural supernaturalism and the personalization of the universal. I trace a different development, anticipated in key respects by writers such as Alexander Pope, James Thomson, and Oliver Goldsmith: the discovery of local microhistories that become legible in the physical features of specific topographical sites. Responding to contemporary antiquarian historiography and growing anxiety about the dissolution of local differences under the pressure of what we now call globalization, the Romantic tradition of reading places developed and expanded upon Enlightenment universalism not so much by retreating to localism as by tracing the manifestations of international historical processes within discrete domestic locations./nMy first chapter, “The Other Within,” demonstrates the integral role that England’s oldest and most economically developed colony, Wales, played in establishing hegemonic ways of interpreting landscape and history throughout the long nineteenth century. I begin by showing how William Gilpin’s practice of picturesque view-making, first conceptualized in south Wales, incorporates colonial logics of extraction and improvement that were emerging throughout the industrializing Welsh countryside. Turning to two native responses to the new British obsession with Welsh history and culture, I demonstrate that at the same time as the Welsh landscape enabled English writers to fantasize about the productive and profitable manipulation of subjugated places, it also generated discourses of resistance to imperial power. Iolo Morganwg’s “philosophy of history” articulates a dialectical engagement with the history of English/n2/noppression that promises to open onto a new, Welsh world order. Richard Llwyd’s long topographical poem Beaumaris Bay (1800) uses antiquarian place reading to unsettle Whig historiographical accounts of the English domination of Wales. The chapter argues that, despite critical neglect over the last two centuries, Romantic Wales was a crucial testing-ground in the development both of techniques of colonial control and of practices of anti-imperial resistance./nMy second chapter, “A Tale of Two Skulls,” focuses on Irish Gothic, a genre that makes Ireland’s history of colonial violence horrifyingly legible. Beginning with a consideration of Edmund Burke’s emphatic but little-studied contempt for antiquarian history, I show that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antiquarians portrayed Irish landscapes as saturated with traces of exploitation and dominance – a legible public record of colonial violence that kept threatening to erupt into the Romantic present. In The Wild Irish Girl (1806), Sydney Owenson compares the Irish landscape to a dizzying array of British overseas colonies and strategic holdings, so that Ireland functions as a dark mirror of insatiable colonial ambition. I then read James Hardiman’s narrative of the destruction of the skull of the eighteenth-century Irish bard Carolan at the hands of “a northern Orangeman” in 1796 as an instance of colonial erasure of native archives. Finally, the chapter turns to Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s novel The House by the Churchyard (1863), which also recovers a history of colonial violence from a disinterred Irish skull. The novel uses the emblem of a crushed and trepanned – but crucially still legible – skull to figure colonial violence as seeping from Irish history through the Irish soil and into vengeful Irish bodies./nMoving from the anticolonial critique manifest in Irish place reading to explore how the topos was used in the service of a British nationalist project, Chapter Three, “Walter Scott’s Nationalist Internationalism,” argues that Scott’s immensely successful but now neglected verse romances articulate a collectivism that accounts both for their unprecedented wartime popularity and for their sudden fall from favor in the postwar period. By casting rural British landscapes as virtual storehouses whose physical features register evidence of a common heroic past that belongs equally to all Britons, the verse romances both defuse intranational difference and reassure their readers that the nation could withstand Napoleonic invasion. Although their rousing collectivism struck a chord across class lines in the uncertain days of the Napoleonic Wars, intensified class warfare in the postwar moment provoked deep skepticism of their morality and social utility. As the threat of invasion subsided, the poems’ nationalistic promises became less urgently appealing even as their economic implications became newly uncomfortable. Against critical claims that Scott outgrew writing poetry, I argue that his shift from verse to prose romance owed as much to changing geopolitical conditions as it did to his artistic development. While Scott is often cast as an inventor of national tradition and of cultural Scottishness more generally, I show that much of his international appeal was due to his unparalleled ability to reveal Scottish culture as a contingent product of global and hyperlocal forces (military invasions, small-time smuggling, climate change, and traditional agricultural practices, for instance), and to make the retrieval of these occluded histories pleasurable to diverse and far-flung audiences./nMy last chapter, “The Global Parish: Anglicanism, Localism, Empire,” examines nineteenth-century debates over the imperial function of the Anglican Church at home and abroad. I begin by showing how William Wordsworth’s The Excursion makes a Church-guided program of monitorial pedagogy invented by a Scotsman and applied in India (Andrew Bell’s “Madras System”) integral to the construction of an English national culture. For Wordsworth, unifying the nation entails teaching the populace to read, both literally and figuratively, for it is/n3/nonly once The Excursion’s local places become historically legible that domestic community and national harmony can take root. Turning to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s On the Constitution of Church and State Government, I show that Coleridge recognized and rejected the simultaneously local and international materialism implicit in the place reading tradition from antiquarianism through Scott to The Excursion. Coleridge and his Victorian heir John Ruskin try to transcend the materialist and historicist impulses latent in Scott and Wordsworth by pivoting to an idealist medieval socialism that positions materialism as an unreliable – and dangerously foreign – foundation upon which to construct a national culture./nA coda on Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and the opening chapters of Capital casts Marx’s understanding of commodities as “congealing” human labor as a different kind of departure from the Romantic place reading tradition. Marx revives Enlightenment universalist projects that find in all sites the same didactic message and the same universal history. Such international historical materialism rebuffs the idealist loco-socialisms of Coleridge and Ruskin, even as its will to scientific systematization occludes the materialist historicisms on offer in various instances of Romantic place reading. Reading Places recovers a pre-Marxian British tradition of using literature to theorize culture as the product of international material processes; it ends by tracing that tradition’s echoes in the twentieth-century cultural histories and theories of writers like Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson, who sought to restore local densities to Marxian materialism.

Advisor: Duncan, Ian