Prophets and pirates: The space of empire in British Romantic literature

This dissertation explores what it means to speak of "space" in the age of empire, arguing that geographical practices are key to understanding the political and poetic practices of the Romantic period. Though I treat a number of writers whose relation to Romantic literature is in some sense "marginal"---including Joanna Southcott, Richard Brothers, Christopher Smart, and Olaudah Equiano---the project is organized around William Blake and Lord Byron, whose representations of prophecy and piracy model practices that challenge imperial space. The prophet and the pirate are either resistant or oblivious to the territorial designations of states and nations, the prophet making plans for the kingdom of God on earth, and the pirate declaring himself to be "of the sea." Their practices of settling land and claiming ships in defiance of national authority are material interferences in the system of nationalized space. The prophet and the pirate are also connected, literally and symbolically, to the Ottoman empire: the prophet is anxious to convert the "heathen," while the pirate is aligned with the Orient in eighteenth-century popular writing. I argue that the configurations and fault lines of Britain's imperialism become more legible when read in relation to these connections. My dissertation therefore charts the potential of rogue travelers to delineate the spatial and imaginative limits of imperial expansion. The ever-present fear of Britons "turning Turk" speaks to the vulnerabilities of Britain's imperial project: exotic "contagions" do not recognize national boundaries. Or holy ones, for that matter. If it was in Britain's economic interests to imagine a Jerusalem "in ruins" and in need of (European) cultivation, what prophets planned was a city too temporally and spatially layered for territorial possession. And Barbary pirates, who preyed on European merchant ships in the so-called territorial waters near trading ports, proved the sea to be equally resistant to colonization. In different ways, both the prophet and the pirate---for whom space is not a fact but a practice---expose and disorganize the fiction of national space.