What does British Romanticism look like from Asian perspectives? This volume provides the first book-length treatment of a still largely unexplored topic: the reception of British Romanticism in south-east and east Asia (including India , mainland China , Taiwan, Korea , and Japan ) during the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, in the context of industrialization , revolutionary political movements, and the rise of modern vernacular literatures in each of these nations. The essays in this volume collectively explore the ways in which Romantic writers were introduced into the region, initially through European trade and imperialism , and the ways in which Romantic tradition was subsequently adapted and transformed by Asian translators, authors, and artists. They aim not only to make a valuable contribution to studies of English literature in Asia, but also to challenge a tendency in Romantic-period studies to draw a line between European âtraditionâ and Asian âreceptionâ, and to focus more readily on European representations of the âEastâ (largely as a result of disciplinary boundaries and, often, linguistic limitations) than to explore Asian authors actively responding to Romantic authors and participating in their own self-construction.
In the first place, viewing British Romanticism from an Asian vantage point requires reassessing conventional chronologies. If, in the European context, Romanticism has traditionally been seen as focused on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a more suitable starting point in Asia may be the 1820s, with the circulation of Romantic poetry in colonial journals in India . The movement reaches its high point in the period from 1880 to 1940, a period which sees widespread experimentation with Western literary tropes and styles by authors including Rabindranath Tagore (1861â1941) in India, Xu Zhimo (1897â1931) in China , and Shimazaki TĆson (1872â1943) in Japan , as well as the introduction of Romantic poetry in university courses (contemporaneous with the formal establishment of English Literature departments in the West). The timeline and principal modes of contact with Romantic literature vary by region: in Japan, the study of Romanticism is shaped by the pro-Western attitude of the Meiji period elite from the 1880s; in Korea , it is mediated through Japanese imperialism; in China, the study of Western literature develops in the context of the revolutionary movements of the early twentieth century, later cast into upheaval by civil war and Communist victory (1945â9). This was of course a period of simultaneous encounter with Western literature in multiple imported and translated forms: there is a sense in which William Shakespeare (1564â1616), the Romantics, and Victorian literature are contemporaries in an Asian context. Nevertheless, our contention in this volume is that, instead of being blended into a generalized image (as arguably often happened with the reception of Japanese and Chinese literature in Victorian England), Romanticism retains a distinctive identity and an enduring popularity in both high literature and popular culture (Mary Ellis Gibson , travelling in India half a century after the end of British colonialism, finds numerous cultural legacies of Romanticism, including a police officer in Kolkata who âdelight[ed] in reciting Wordsworth to meâ). 1
The popularity of Romantic poetry, in particular, might in part be understood in terms of the ease of translation and greater cross-cultural mobility of the short lyric , compared to the novel or drama . More fundamentally, though, we might point to the intrinsic appeal of Romanticism to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Asian authors, as itself the literary response to an analogous process of European industrialization and political and cultural modernization undertaken a century earlier. In Marilyn Butlerâs celebrated phrase, Romanticism is a âcomplex of responses to certain conditions which Western society has experienced and continues to experience since the middle of the eighteenth centuryâ: the present tense indicating that Romanticism can not only be understood as an ongoing movement but also potentially applied to non-Western contexts. 2 Similarly, Saree Makdisiâs reading of Romanticism as a largely atavistic movement which âcelebrates the pre- or anti-modern at the moment at which that eradication is just beginningâ cautions that âSuch celebrations are not unique to Britain, and can be located wherever the process of modernization comes into contact with âtraditionalâ cultures and ways of lifeâ. 3 Both British Romanticism and its Asian equivalent are located at opposite ends of what Buzzan and Lawson describe as a transformative âlong nineteenth centuryâ: the era, beginning in 1776 and closing in 1914, in which global modernity reconstituted the mode of power underpinning international relations, opening a power gap between those who harnessed the revolutions of modernity, and those who were denied access to them. 4 The essays in this volume show the various ways in which Asian writers draw selectively on British Romanticism to mediate their own ambivalent responses towards the âclashâ between tradition and modernity, across a range of topics, including political and sexual freedoms, ecological change, oral and folk tradition, gender relations, and religious belief.
One of the key ideas in this volume is the creativity and dynamism of the Asian response to Romanticism. The concept of âreceptionââwith its metaphorical echoes of radio or television signalsâhas an unfortunate tendency to evoke both a âpassive recipientâ and a linear âprocess of interpretation (from the past to the present)â. 5 The notion that Asian reception of Romanticism is derivative or merely imitative extends, as Makarand R. Paranjape notes, to English responses to Henry Derozio (1809â31) in the early nineteenth century. 6 For the purposes of the present study, we should also be aware of the ways in which a discussion of âAsian Romanticismâ may appear a refusal to grant critical attention to Asian authors except insofar as they can be placed in a dependent position within Western hierarchies of value (thus praise of Derozio as an âIndian Keats â is also simultaneously a containment and diminishment). 7 As this volume repeatedly underlines, Asian âreceptionâ is often best understood in the sense of audience granted, by a courteous (or sceptical) host: as a process in which Romanticism is scrutinized, reworked, selectively blended with local traditions, and positioned in the domestic literary marketplace. Another risk inherent in models of reception is the propensity to present the imported text as the âsourceâ of certain ideas and literary tropes, rather than (as is more commonly the case) as embraced because of its ability to resonate with and provide new perspectives on debates already present within the âhostâ culture. To change the metaphor, Romanticism should not be understood as a stone thrown into a placid Asian pond, extending outwards in a series of diminishing ripples; rather, it is an intellectual current flowing into a churning river of contemporary ideas and debate, becoming incorporated into the latter as it subtly influences its direction.
It should be clear that the use of âWesternâ and âAsianâ in this volume, although often a convenient shorthand, is not intended to imply the Orientalist construction of East and West as monolithic and opposing categories (an idea which, Zhang Longxi argues, is often revived in apparently more progressive modern discourses of cultural âincommensurabilityâ). 8 Saree Makdisi has argued that the concept of the âWesternâ is created, in British discourse, during the Romantic period, through hierarchical contrasts made both with Asia and with spaces within Britain itself imagined as âundevelopedâ. 9 The essays in this volume similarly show a process of reflection on this opposition by Asian writers (who are additionally required to contend with the customary Romantic figuration of Asia as a space of exoticism, despotism or anti-modernity). 10 Although this could sometimes lead to simplistic âOccidentalist...