Taking Percy Bysshe Shelley's A Philosophical View of Reform as its key document, this dissertation makes two contributions to nineteenth-century studies. First, it locates Shelley in the context of England's colonial venture in British India, a context new to Shelleyan study, although several scholars have investigated his Orientalist elements. Second, it ties together several major, seemingly disparate--even competing--late-eighteenth- /early-nineteenth-century discourses on India, illustrating how these discourses were later enlisted to serve the English Raj. Beyond reviewing Orientalism, Utilitarianism, Evangelicalism, and Imperialism, this dissertation also treats related contemporary issues of class, gender, race, and nationalism and finds that subjectivities that middle-class males established for the Indian 'other' were later re-imported to England to further subjugate women, workers, and non-English Britishers. The View demonstrates both Shelley's knowledge of these debates and his internalized contradictions concerning India. Although chiefly concerned with Shelley's lifetime, this study also reviews late-eighteenth-century origins of the discourses and their Victorian distillation into the new imperialism Chapter One surveys period issues of class, gender, race, and nationalism; their relationship to British India; and Shelley's personal and literary treatment of these issues. Chapter Two reviews overall English Orientalism concerning India and Indic elements in Shelley's Mab through Triumph. Chapter Three treats Utilitarian projects in India and England, and outlines Shelley's mastery and later rejection of Utilitarianism (Defence) as limited rationalism. Chapter Four studies Evangelical Indian and English projects, and reviews Shelley's seeming contradictions between attacking Christianity (Essay on Christianity; View) yet approving of missionaries in India (View). Chapter Five illustrates the coalescing of the discourses into Victorian manifest imperialism in India and ideological imperialism at home. It also tests Shelley as early 'reluctant imperialist' (Brantlinger) or unwitting pre-1857 collaborator (Said). Finally, nothing Shelley's hatred of tyranny (Cenci; Prometheus Unbound) and his theories on transience of empire (Hellas), and individual progress as sole means of breaking history's repeating cycles, this study posits that Shelley, although highly conflicted, could not have guessed England's future imperialism and that he offers Jesus the anarchist as model to show Indians how to reject their 'paralysing' caste system / acase@tulane.edu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_24099 |
| Date | January 1995 |
| Contributors | Harrington-Austin, Eleanor Joyce (Author), Rothenberg, Molly Anne (Thesis advisor) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Access requires a license to the Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest) database., Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law |
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