ABSTRACT
Defining Romanticism from an Asian perspective introduces time lags in terms of reception history. It also tends to imply that what comes after is necessarily lesser, and that this legacy should be regarded as an imposition, simply a covert form of ideological control. This essay will challenge both this successionist chronology and diffusionist model whereby Romanticism is imported from European traditions whose residual authority remains unquestioned. It examines English-language writing from the late eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, focusing on specific examples from Anna Maria (“Adieu to India”), Henry Derozio (“To the Dog-Star”), David Lester Richardson (“London in the Morning” and “View of Calcutta”), and Toru Dutt (“Our Casuarina Tree”). This corpus has until recently been largely ignored, regarded in Britain as secondary and derivative, and in India as supine and complicit in imperial rule. In contrast, I shall emphasise the phenomenon of global simultaneity in terms of cultural transmission, and the way in which these texts frequently appear to displace their precursors in the familiar Romantic canon. As such, they may be regarded as exemplifying a trans- or post-national poetics; a legacy bequeathed to the future.
