Romantic revisions: Novels of the Americas de-scribing empire

This dissertation examines five twentieth-century novels from former British colonies across the Americas and considers why these novels demonstrate a significant engagement with British Romantic poetry. "Romantic Revisions" analyzes Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Wilson Harris's Palace of the Peacock---works written by a diverse range of authors in very different geographical, historical, and social contexts. Nevertheless, these novels all return to Romantic poetry as they grapple with the legacy of British colonialism within their respective American frames of reference.;Building on the work of critics who have highlighted the importance of intertextuality for postcolonial literature, "Romantic Revisions" provides new insight into the poetics and politics of revision by focusing on the geographical region of the Americas. This study, whose broad range spans from the U.S. to Canada to the Caribbean to South America, demonstrates that British Romantic poetry has become central to a counter-discourse operating throughout the Americas. By analyzing American writers' Romantic intertexts, I argue that British Romantic poetry---with its revolution of poetic form and remapping of landscape as a site of political reflection---provides these authors with a common language with which they can scrutinize institutions of power that were inscribed during British colonialism.;Although these diverse American novels adapt Romantic poetics for their own distinctive sociopolitical commentaries, this body of transnational fiction writing offers a collective critique of the legacies of British colonialism in postcolonial America. "Romantic Revisions" traces the circulation of Romantic poetics in these works to further an understanding of the ways in which literary history influences examinations of contemporary American societies.