Title Sounding imperial : poetic voice and the politics of empire, 1730-1820 / James Mulholland

Published Baltimore : The Johns Hopkins University Press, [2012] ©2013

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Description 1 online resource (xiv, 217 pages) : illustrations Contents Introduction : The Global Aesthetics of Poetic Voice -- Thomas Gray, Virtual Authorship, and the Performed Voice. Authoring Gray's "Elegy" ; Performing Gray's "Elegy" ; Impersonating the Bard? ; Wildness and Welsh Prosody ; Quotation Marks ; (Un)Editing the Bards -- Wales, Public Poetry, and the Politics of Collective Voice. Bardic Nationalism Reconsidered ; The Aboriginal Aesthetics of Iolo Morganwg ; Listening to the Welsh Past ; Dead Voices Reanimated -- Scotland and the Invention of Voice. Primitive Passions, Poetry Addiction, History ; Ambiguous Speech ; Writing, Re-performance, and Restored Voices ; Intimate Hailing ; Ossian's Afterlife -- Impersonating Native Voices in Anglo-Indian Poetry. William Jones and the Fountainhead of Verse ; Making the Subaltern Speak ; Rewriting Gray's "The Bard" in India ; Dislocated Orientalism -- Coda : Reading the Archive of the Inauthentic Summary Spoken words come alive in written verse. In this book, the author offers an assessment of the origins, evolution, and importance of poetic voice in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By examining a series of literary experiments in which authors imitated oral voices and impersonated foreign speakers, the author uncovers an innovative global aesthetics of poetic voice that arose as authors invented new ways of crafting textual voices and appealing to readers. As poets drew on cultural forms from around Great Britain and across the globe, impersonating “primitive” speakers and reviving ancient oral performances (or fictionalizing them in verse), they invigorated English poetry. The author situates these experiments with oral voices and foreign speakers within the wider context of British nationalism at home and colonial expansion overseas. This book traces this global aesthetic by reading texts from canonical authors like Thomas Gray, James Macpherson, and Felicia Hemans together with lesser-known writers, like Welsh antiquarians, Anglo-Indian poets of colonialism, and impersonators of Pacific islanders. The frenetic borrowing, movement, and adaptation of verse of this time offers a powerful analytic by which scholars can understand anew poetry’s role in the formation of national culture and the exercise of colonial power Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 167-210) and index Notes English Print version record Subject Imperialism in literature. Politics in literature. Politics and literature -- History -- 19th century Politics and literature -- History -- 18th century English poetry -- 19th century -- History and criticism English poetry -- 18th century -- History and criticism Political poetry -- History and criticism English poetry Imperialism in literature Political poetry Politics and literature Politics in literature Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. History Form Electronic book LC no. 2012027075 ISBN 9781421408552 1421408554

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