Romantic Globalism
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Romantic Globalism Romantic Globalism BRITISH LITERATURE AND MoDERN WorLD ORDER, 1750–1830 T Evan Gottlieb THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS COLUMBus Copyright © 2014 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gottlieb, Evan, 1975– author. Romantic globalism : British literature and modern world order, 1750–1830 / Evan Gottlieb. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1254-7 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8142-1254-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-9357-7 (cd-rom) ISBN-10: 0-8142-9357-3 (cd-rom) 1. English literature—18th century—History and criticism. 2. Globalization in literature. 3. Romanticism—Great Britain. I. Title. PR149.G54G68 2014 820.9'006—dc23 2013037404 Cover and text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Minion Pro Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENts T Acknowledgments vii INTRODUCTION Recovering Romantic Globalism 1 CHAPTER ONE Going Global: The Scottish Enlightenment Theorizes Modernity 17 CHAPTER TWO The Global Gothic: Sympathy, Cosmopolitanism, and Tolerance in Radcliffe’s Romances 44 CHAPTER THREE Fighting Words: British Poetry and the Napoleonic Wars 68 CHAPTER FOUR The Clash of Civilizations and Its Discontents: Byron, Scott, and the East 95 CHAPTER FIVE Modern Sovereignty and Global Hospitality in Scott’s European Waverley Novels 121 CONCLUSION Romanticism, Mediation, Globalization 147 Notes 155 Bibliography 188 Index 206 AcKNowLEDGMENts T At the conclusion of a long process of drafting, writing, and revising, it is a true pleasure to thank the many people who helped me along the way. At the very forefront stand Anthony Jarrells and Matthew Wickman, who not only read and critiqued draft chapters of Romantic Globalism but subse- quently (and unbeknownst to me) generously agreed to serve as its anony- mous reviewers for OSU Press. I also owe a huge debt of thanks to Samuel Baker, who twice provided invaluable advice for reframing the book’s argu- ment. Adam Beach, Yoon Sun Lee, James Mulholland, Pam Perkins, and Paul Westover each read draft chapters and gave me much-appreciated feed- back. Many other colleagues provided insights and encouragement at vari- ous stages, including Liz Bohls, Miranda Burgess, Jim Carson, Alex Dick, Ian Duncan, Penny Fielding, Deidre Lynch, Ken McNeil, Robert Miles, Rob Mitchell, Steve Newman, Susan Oliver, Padma Rangarajan, and Juliet Shields. I am also grateful to the various scholarly organizations, societies, and con- ferences under whose collegial auspices I gave conference papers related to this project: the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, the Northeast and North- west ASECS chapters, the International Walter Scott Conference, and the 2006 Scottish Romanticism in World Literatures conference at UC Berkeley. While the process of formulating and sharpening ideas may take place across a range of locales, real and virtual, the writing process (for me at least) vii viii • AcKNowLEDGMENts is firmly rooted at home. Accordingly, I want to thank my colleagues in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film at Oregon State University, espe- cially Richmond Barbour, Peter Betjemann, Neil Davison, Ray Malewitz, Jil- lian St. Jacques, and Tara Williams for their ever-available good cheer and good sense. My students, both undergraduate and graduate, provided many opportunities for me to try out parts of what follows in their courses. I have also consistently received tangible institutional support for the research and writing of Romantic Globalism. My sincere thanks go to department chairs and school directors both past and present (Kerry Ahearn, Tracy Daugherty, Anita Helle, and Bob Schwartz); Dave Robinson, Wendy Madar, and everyone else at the Oregon State University Center for the Humanities, where both the first and last chapters of this book were drafted; Dean Larry Rogers and the College of Liberal Arts for a Faculty Research Grant; and the OSU Val- ley Library for additional travel funds. I also want to acknowledge the many office staff and specialists at Oregon State University who have helped me repeatedly with arrangements for course schedules, leave time, travel reim- bursement, and many other small but vital tasks: Jenny Bunch, Shelley Fell, Ann Leen, Felicia Phillips, Alison Ruch, and Aurora Terhune. Special thanks are due to everyone at The Ohio State University Press who helped bring this project to fruition, including Rebecca Bender, Mal- colm Litchfield, Eugene O’Connor, and especially Sandy Crooms. I am also grateful to Scott Smiley for preparing this book’s index. Finally, no set of acknowledgments could be complete without thank- ing my family for their incredible support, frequent cheerleading, consistent interest in my work, and unconditional affection. This book is dedicated to Lynette, with all my love, always. A version of parts of Chapter Three was previously published as “Fight- ing Words: Representing the Napoleonic Wars in the Poetry of Hemans and Barbauld,” European Romantic Review 20.3 (July 2009): 327–43. Reprinted by permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandf.co.uk/ journals). INtroDUCTION T Recovering Romantic Globalism amuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Fears in Solitude” announces its historical context in its subtitle, “Written April 1798, During the Alarm of an Inva- Ssion.” The poem’s nationalistic sentiments are equally displayed on its sur- face. Coleridge, angry at having been under suspicion (along with his friend William Wordsworth) of spying for the French, loudly announces his patrio- tism: “But, O dear Britain! O my mother Isle! / Needs must thou prove a name most dear and holy / To me . who revere / All bonds of natural love, and find them all / Within the limits of thy rocky shores.”1 What troubles Coleridge, however, is that those apparently “natural . limits” of the nation- state, his beloved Britain, are in danger of being breached by outside forces. The domestic peace that Britons have come to take for granted—“[p]eace long preserv’d by fleets and perilous seas” (84)—is under threat in a manner that imperils the identities of citizen and country alike: My God! it is a melancholy thing For such a man, who would full fain preserve His soul in calmness . that he must think What uproar and what strife may now be stirring This way or that o’er these silent hills—Invasion, and the thunder and the shout, 1 2 • INtroDUCTION And all the crash of onset; fear and rage, And undetermined conflict . (29–31, 34–39) The poet’s inability to determine the origins of these imagined cries and tumult indicates Coleridge’s profound disorientation as he forecasts the unraveling of the social fabric that would accompany a foreign invasion. But if Britain is threatened externally, Coleridge suggests, this is the inevitable consequence of its having already compromised its internal integrity through morally dubious activities like the slave trade: “Ev’n so, my countrymen! have we gone forth / And borne to distant tribes slavery and pangs, / And, deadlier far, our vices . ” (50–52). Having made a habit (and an industry) of breach- ing other nations’ borders, Coleridge implies, Britain cannot expect to remain impermeable forever. The full-scale French invasion Coleridge feared never materialized; instead, Britain emerged from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars as Europe’s most dominant nation-state, a position it held mostly unchallenged until World War I. What “Fears in Solitude” forecasts accurately, however, is a future in which Britons no longer have the luxury of imagining they exist in splendid isolation from the rest of the world. Although Coleridge expresses a penultimate wish to be left to “my own lowly cottage, where my babe / And my babe’s mother dwell in peace!” (222–23), the poem’s concluding lines not only hint at the futility of that desire (since Coleridge’s domestic life was in reality anything but peaceful), but also highlight the artificiality of the speaker’s prophesied withdrawal into the purely local and immediate. For no sooner does he shut the door to his cottage, than Coleridge opens his heart and mind “to indulge Love, / and the thoughts that yearn for human kind” (228–29). “Fears in Solitude” may explicitly express a yearning for protective isolation, but implicitly it speaks to the inevitability of human contact, over distances and at speeds and intensities hitherto unknown. It speaks, that is, to the experience of globalization. Neither Coleridge nor any Romantic-era author would have used “glo- balization” to describe the cluster of hopes and anxieties expressed by “Fears in Solitude,” since the term was not coined until well into the twentieth cen- tury.2 Nevertheless, the fundamental argument of this book is that many Brit- ish writers of the long Romantic era were aware of the global processes and dynamics that were increasingly reshaping their lives, their nation, and their world. I argue that a number of the most influential and popular authors of this period—including David Hume, Adam Smith, Ann Radcliffe, Felicia Hemans, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Lord Byron, and especially Walter Scott— wrote texts that not only encouraged readers to think globally, but also strove REcoVERING ROMANTIC GLOBALISM • 3 (albeit in different ways, and with differing degrees of ambivalence) to explore the ethical imperatives of such thinking. This emergent global imaginary is what I call “Romantic globalism.”3 GLOBALIZATION: THE LONG VIEW Later in this introduction, I discuss some of the unique developmental char- acteristics of Romantic globalism. First, I want to specify what is meant by “globalization,” since this term has become so ubiquitous in both popular and scholarly discourse.