ABSTRACT
The chapter offers a cultural and literary history of the representation, for Anglophone readers on both sides the Atlantic, of a particularly puzzling and powerful Indian. It explores Southey's Neolin, the most ambiguous character in his transatlantic poem, in the context of the witness-accounts, historian's commentaries and fictional sketches on which Southey drew. Most notably the groundbreaking drama Ponteach itself a transatlantic work published in London and later attributed to an American colonist, Robert Rogers, who had personally experienced Neolin's effect on the Delaware Indians. Focusing on the fictionalized Neolin in detail, the chapter develops arguments that it adumbrated in Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture. It examines the work of Beshero-Bondar, Nigel Leask, and others, focusing however on Neolin, rather than on the Aztec priests on whom these critics have concentrated, because he is, the author think, the key to Southey's vision of colonial conquest as a civilizing mission.
