Numéro 77-78, fall 2021, spring 2022

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This essay takes a new look at one of the most disturbing images of the Romantic period in order to reconsider the ethical significance of fictional episodes as they are resituated in Romantic-era literary anthologies. It uses the concept of the “diagram” to correlate the “Description of the Brooks Slave Ship” with anthologized versions of an episode from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and it finds in these different works a similar invitation for viewers or readers to fill in the blank spaces of printed texts. The image of the Brooks slave ship and Sterne’s episode involving a silent African girl expose, through the details of print, the functions that visual, narrative, and imaginative perspectives play in white authors’ representations of Black suffering.

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There is a persistent tendency in Byron scholarship to view the poet’s depictions of sexual activity as symbolic or metaphorical, a vehicle for political satire, social commentary, or attacks on religion. However, Byron’s treatment of sex must sometimes be considered as sex qua sex (or as Byron memorably describes it, “fuff-fuff”). This is particularly true of The Waltz: An Apostrophic Hymn, a poem that deftly transforms the transgressive physicality of the “Voluptuous Waltz” into a codified expression of adulterous desire. This article considers how the theme of adultery, a pervasive and contentious element in contemporary print culture, informs Byron’s treatment of waltzing, investigating the rich array of cultural materials he incorporates into his satirical poem. This recovery of the poet’s subtle topical parodies and subversions allows for a more nuanced appreciation of the full scope of his satirical attacks in this complex and multifaceted poem.

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Robert Browning first published “The Heretic’s Tragedy” in his best-known collection of poems, Men and Women, in 1855. The poem is supposedly a medieval theatrical performance, or “interlude,” depicting the execution by burning of the accused heretic Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the Knights Templar, in Paris in 1314. It is a weird and disturbing work, which has hitherto received little critical attention. It is the contention of this article that a major and previously unidentified source for this work is Robert Southey’s 1798 poem “The Origin of the Rose,” which is based on a Christian legend initially recounted in Sir John Mandeville’s medieval travel narrative The Book of Marvels and Treasures. The legend tells of a Jewish woman from Bethlehem unjustly accused of fornication, who is saved from burning through divine intervention. Browning’s poem deliberately “reverses” Southey’s in situation, outcome, and imagery (specifically, the depiction of roses). This article discusses “The Heretic’s Tragedy” in relation to Browning’s critical depiction of Roman Catholicism in his work at this period, as well as the poet’s knowledge of Southey’s work and career.

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This essay seeks to re-evaluate nakshikantha, a women’s quilting tradition in Bengal, and reconfigure the discourse around it. The quilts came in various sizes and shapes, depending on what utility they served. The focus of this essay will be on specimens of the large rectangular pieces, meant to be coverlets or rugs to sit upon, that were called sujni kantha. The art of covering the quilted surface with elaborate patterns flourished in colonial Bengal in the nineteenth century. The sweeping changes in the sociopolitical fabric of the region that began with the ascendance of British power after the Battle of Plassey accelerated in the second part of the nineteenth century. The embroidered tableaux stitched into the surface of the sujni kantha bear witness to some of these rapid changes. The pieces, which were made in rural Bengal, have been collected in museums across the world, as well as in India. They emerged as collectors’ objects around the 1930s, buoyed by a nationalist discourse that sought to foreground the spiritual autonomy of India in its long-standing traditions of art and craft. A product of women’s labour inscribed with women’s unique perspectives on change has thus been de-historicized and seen as idealized examples of women’s service, patience, and cultural purity – values espoused by the nationalist elite of India. This article seeks to locate nakshi kantha within the specific historical circumstances of their production and circulation and to see them as registers of a specifically feminine perspective on social change. Partha Chatterjee's well-accepted thesis that binaries of inside/outside that developed in the latter half of colonial rule played out along gendered lines, enjoining a restrictive, homebound life upon women, requires qualification. The sujni kantha specimens I examine challenge colonial stereotypes of native women relegated to the shadowy inner quarters of zenanas stuck in time, while also resisting the nationalist construct of idealized Indian womanhood.

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The present article explores the intersections of history, poetry, and empire in the context of Scott’s “Serim; or, the Artificial Famine: An East-Indian Eclogue.” With close analysis of the poem and the circumstances of the Bengal famine of 1770, it reads “Serim” as a poetic protest from the “metropole” against injustice committed by the British at the imperial periphery. Further, the article deliberates on the representation of the Bengalis in the poem while scrutinising orientalist tropes employed by Scott. With a final major turn, it weighs the significance of Scott’s eclogue as a cultural text documenting the first mass experience of colonial evil in India vis-à-vis some Bangla verses.

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The South Park Street Cemetery in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) is a popular tourist destination that houses the tombs of many key European figures from the period of East India Company rule. Some of these figures influenced British Romanticism in ways that were overt; others in ways that were less direct. In postcolonial India, however, although British Romanticism is still an important part of school and university curricula, the cemetery and the cultural history it contains are often forgotten. Of course, even the very existence of such colonial cemeteries has been under threat until recently, and the South Park Street Cemetery has lost its entire northern section. In a postcolonial India in which cemeteries have historically been under threat as vestiges of colonial rule that need to be erased and are neglected within classrooms where Romanticism is studied, it is important to highlight how they function as “contact zones” (Pratt). The cemetery serves as a physical index—and a reminder for mainstream research on Romanticism—of both the influence that Britain had on colonial India and India’s influence on British Romantic literature and culture. This article aims to (re)view Romanticism from this bipartite perspective and to explore how it is intertwined with the lesser-known stories that emerge from researching a colonial cemetery.