ABSTRACT

This introduction chapter presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book talks about Romantic literature with a non-literary passage. It illustrates the frequent inter-generic transfers between the Romantic novel and other types of writing, such as travelogues, ethnographies, and encyclopedias. The book discovers the Romantic construction of one of five subject positions: the "white native," "the metis," "the disciplined savage," "the black aristocrat," and "the rebellious slave." It demonstrates that these racialized subjects of Romantic colonial novels are shaped by competing drives to both comply with colonial expansion and challenge the imperialist project. Reading race in the Romantic novel means exploring how its imagination of race participated in the cross-currents of "racial formation" of its time. The book explores one such "historically situated project" of race in the French Romantic novel. It focuses on Paul et Virginie, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's pastoral tale set in the Indian Ocean colony of Mauritius.