| My dissertation begins with a simple question: why do the Young Romantics---Byron, Shelley, Keats---stage so much of their poetry in Oriental or Orientalized settings? I argue that any sort of historical answer must be firmly grounded in the Young Romantics' radical philosophical, political, and poetic commitments. The Orient---self-critically understood by the Young Romantics as a historically determined fantasmatic projection of the West's own fears and desires---provides a setting in which to explore and critique the epistemological, existential, and above all political limits of their own solipsistic imaginations. It is simultaneously an escape from and return to the self, a vicious circle. While in a certain sense this is Orientalism by definition and at its most potent, I show that the Young Romantics' treatment of the Orient becomes---because it is nearly always self-conscious and ironic---itself a critique of the Orientalism practiced by the eighteenth century and the First Generation Romantics. Where the first generation Romantics saw a solution in the self (as in Coleridge's "I am that I am" or Wordsworth's "bliss of solitude"), the younger Romantics see only an endless desert of questions---an imagined waste populated by their own fears and ideals. My project claims that poems like The Revolt of Islam (1818), Byron's "Eastern" Tales (1812-14), or even Keats's Lamia (1819) anticipate Edward Said's critique, and postcolonial studies more generally, avant la lettre. |
