This book examines the reception of British Romanticism in India and East Asia (including China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan). Building on recent scholarship on “Global Romanticism”, it develops a reciprocal, cross-cultural model of scholarship, in which “Asian Romanticism” is recognized as itself an important part of the Romantic literary tradition. It explores the connections between canonical British Romantic authors (including Austen, Blake, Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth) and prominent Asian writers (including Natsume Sōseki, Rabindranath Tagore, and Xu Zhimo). The essays also challenge Eurocentric assumptions about reception and periodization, exploring how, since the early nineteenth century, British Romanticism has been creatively adapted and transformed by Asian writers.

Contesting the idea that the study of Anglophone literature and literary studies is simply a foreign import in Asia, this collection addresses the genealogies of textual critique and institutionalized forms of teaching of English language and literature in Asia through the 19th and 20th centuries, along with an examination of how its present options and possible future directions relate to these historical contexts. It argues that the establishment of Anglophone literature in Asia did not simply “happen”: there were extra-literary and -academic forces at work, inserting and domesticating in Asian universities both the English language and Anglo-American literature, and their attendant cultural and political values. Offering new perspectives for ongoing conversations surrounding the globalization of Anglophone literature in literary and cultural studies, the book also considers the practicalities of teaching both the language and its canon of classic texts, and that the historical formation and shape of English studies in Asia offers lessons that relate not only to the discipline but also may be applied to the humanities as a whole. ​

The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose is a full-length essay collection devoted entirely to British Romantic nonfiction prose. Organized into eight parts, each containing between five and nine chapters arranged alphabetically, the Handbook weaves together familiar and unfamiliar texts, events, and authors, and invites readers to draw comparisons, reimagine connections and disconnections, and confront frequently stark contradictions, within British Romantic nonfiction prose, but also in its relationship to British Romanticism more generally, and to the literary practices and cultural contexts of other periods and countries. The Handbook builds on previous scholarship in the field, considers emerging trends and evolving methodologies, and suggests future areas of study. Throughout the emphasis is on lucid expression rather than gnomic declaration, and on chapters that offer, not a dutiful survey, but evaluative assessments that keep an eye on the bigger picture yet also dwell meaningfully on specific paradoxes and the most telling examples. Taken as a whole the volume demonstrates the energy, originality, and diversity at the crux of British Romantic nonfiction prose. It vigorously challenges the traditional construction of the British Romantic movement as focused too exclusively on the accomplishments of its poets, and it reveals the many ways in which scholars of the period are steadily broadening out and opening up delineations of British Romanticism in order to encompass and thoroughly evaluate the achievements of its nonfiction prose writers.

This collection of essays expands the study of that immensely widely read and much-adapted novel, beyond the first book – The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (usually known simply as Robinson Crusoe) – to take in the far less well-known Farther Adventures and the almost unread Serious Reflections, beyond Defoe’s texts, to their re-writing and adaptation and beyond the Atlantic and South American context to an Asian and Pacific context. The essays consider both how Asia is represented in the books (in terms of politics, economics, religion), and how the book has been received, adapted, and taught, particularly in Asian contexts.

Romantic Futures is a collection which explores the significance of futurity in British Romanticism from a comparative perspective in three defining manifestations: the future as conscious legacy, by which is meant both influences or continuities and the (anticipations of) impact on the future; the future as revealed by prophecy, whether via religious figures or superstitions; and a meditation on the temporality of the future, or the future as a concept. The book brings together a wide range of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives: from utopian studies, history, religion, and cultural theory to future studies, neuroscience, video games, and art history. Aiming to increase and diversify current critical engagement and highlight the contemporary relevance of the Romantics’ multivalent preoccupation with the future, this collection renews the dialogue between Romanticism and our critical relation to its contemporaneity, especially as it speaks to current understandings of the future in the sciences, arts, and humanities.

Studies the work of Byron, Shelley and De Quincey and other Romantic writers in relation to Britain's imperial designs on the 'Orient'.