Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Postcolonial Literary Studies)

This book convincingly challenges both the extremely short historical memory of most postcolonial work and the all-too-insularly English world still conjured by period specialists. Hogarthian whores and Grub Street hacks, coffee houses and fashionable pastimes, and the burgeoning of print culture all stand revealed as intimately bound to portents of plantation insurgency, agitation for abolition, and the vast fortunes produced by the labouring bodies of the poor, the colonized, and the enslaved. Eighteenth-century studies has never appeared in a more engaged and fascinating light.'Professor Donna Landry, University of KentIn this volume Suvir Kaul addresses the relations between literary culture, English commercial and colonial expansion, and the making of 'Great Britain' in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He argues that literary writing played a crucial role in generating the vocabulary of British nationalism, both in inter-national terms and in attempts to realign political and cult

Literature & Fiction

Kaul, Suvir

British & Irish

Edinburgh University Press

"This book reads Thomas Gray's poems as existing in a dialogic relation with eighteenth-century English discursive and socio-cultural politics. It examines formal and ideological imperatives underlying the construction and effect of the poems, in the process considering the critical and literary-historical issues that arise from such an examination." "The author situates Gray at a moment in literary history when a gentleman-poet is caught in a troubled engagement with the contradictory attractions of the public and the private, of the anonymous market and of the self-selecting coterie. Gray's work is seen as ambivalent, too, about the great contemporary source of public authority - the celebration of mercantile and imperial power. His poems are structured by various versions of this dialectical interplay, and are witness to a poet's need for appropriate social, political, and ideological positions from which to establish poetic and cultural authority." "Throughout, the author focuses on questions of how best to read poems: how to work through the details of the thematic and formal construction of a poem; how to read in this construction the histories of literary, cultural, and ideological practices; how to unravel the discursive, representational, and cononical codes that allow (and encourage) readers to make particular sense of poems. Thus, Gray's poems are located within contemporary poetic theory and practices, and their formal and thematic elements examined not only in an internally dialogic state (that is, within the poem), but also in counterpoint with historical and contemporary discursive practices."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Thomas Gray and Literary Authority: A Study in Ideology and Politics

History & Criticism

Stanford University Press

Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century

In Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire, Suvir Kaul argues that the aggressive nationalism of James Thomson's ode "Rule, Britannia!" (1740) is the condition to which much English poetry of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries aspires. Poets as varied as Marvell, Waller and Dryden, Defoe, Addison, John Dyer and Edward Young, or Goldsmith, Cowper, Hannah More and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, all wrote poems deeply engaged with the British-nation-in-the-making. These poets, and many others like them, recognized that the nation and its values and institutions were being defined by the expansion of overseas trade, naval and military control, plantations and colonies. Their poems both embodied, and were concerned about, the culture and ideology of "Great Britain" (itself an idea of the nation that developed alongside the formation of a British Empire).Poems in this period thus flaunt various images of poetic inspiration that show poetry and culture following triumphantly where mercantile and military ships sail. Or sometimes, more self-aggrandizingly for the poet, they enact the process by which the Muses use their powers to inspire and show the way. Even at their most hesitant, these poems were written as interventions into public discussion; their creativity is tied up with that desire to convince and persuade. Finally, as Kaul writes, it is their encyclopedic desire to incorporate new experiences, visions, and values that makes these poems such fine guides to the world of poetry in the long years in which "Great Britain" was consolidated as an empire, at home and abroad.

Univ of Virginia Pr

In Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire, Suvir Kaul argues that the aggressive nationalism of James Thomson's ode "Rule, Britannia!" (1740) is the condition to which much English poetry of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries aspires. Poets as varied as Marvell, Waller and Dryden, Defoe, Addison, John Dyer and Edward Young, or Goldsmith, Cowper, Hannah More and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, all wrote poems deeply engaged with the British-nation-in-the-making. These poets, and many others like them, recognized that the nation and its values and institutions were being defined by the expansion of overseas trade, naval and military control, plantations and colonies. Their poems both embodied, and were concerned about, the culture and ideology of "Great Britain" (itself an idea of the nation that developed alongside the formation of a British Empire).
Poems in this period thus flaunt various images of poetic inspiration that show poetry and culture following triumphantly where mercantile and military ships sail. Or sometimes, more self-aggrandizingly for the poet, they enact the process by which the Muses use their powers to inspire and show the way. Even at their most hesitant, these poems were written as interventions into public discussion; their creativity is tied up with that desire to convince and persuade. Finally, as Kaul writes, it is their encyclopedic desire to incorporate new experiences, visions, and values that makes these poems such fine guides to the world of poetry in the long years in which "Great Britain" was consolidated as an empire, at home and abroad.

University of Virginia Press

Of Gardens and Graves: Kashmir, Poetry, Politics

In Of Gardens and Graves Suvir Kaul examines the disruption of everyday life in Kashmir in the years following the region's pervasive militarization in 1990. Kaul's autobiographical and analytical essays, which were prompted by his yearly visits to Kashmir, are a combination of political analysis, literary criticism, memoir, and journalistic observation. In them he explores Kashmir's pre- and post-Partition history, the effects of militarization, state repression, the suspension of civil rights on Kashmiris, and the challenge Kashmir represents to the practice of democracy in India. The volume also features translations of Kashmiri poetry written in these years of conflict. These poems constitute an archive of heightened feelings and desires that affectively interrogate official accounts of Kashmir while telling us much about those who face extraordinary political turbulence and violence. Of Gardens and Graves also contains a photo essay by Javed Dar, whose photographs work together with Kaul's essays and the poems to represent the interweaving of ordinary life, civic strife, and spectacular violence in Kashmir.

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

Duke University Press Books

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Books by Kaul, Suvir

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kaul, Suvir. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Postcolonial Literary Studies)

Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Postcolonial Literary Studies)

Thomas Gray and Literary Authority: A Study in Ideology and Politics

Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century

Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century

Of Gardens and Graves: Kashmir, Poetry, Politics

Of Gardens and Graves: Kashmir, Poetry, Politics