Romanticism and the Poetics of Orientation (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Romanticism)

Confronts the racial and ethnic logics of the Oriental subject undergirding the development of Romantic poetics What happens when we redirect our lines of reading along new paths, borders and orientations--those that fail to fit neatly into the cardinal directions of North, South, East and West? In this innovative new study, Joey S. Kim traces shifting orientations - cultural, geographical, aesthetic, racial and gendered - through Orientalist sites, subjects and settings, to offer refreshing insights into the 'Orient' in British Romantic poetry. Examining what the 'Orient' is, where it is, who it stands for and where it leads, she coins the term 'poetics of orientation' to describe a poetics newly aware of cultural difference as a site of aesthetic contestation. Rather than situating the lyric subject in assumed racial whiteness, 'poetics of orientation' repositions the lyric subject within discussions of Orientalism and racial formation, tracing the white supremacist logics that have for too long been dismissed as inessential or nonconsequential to Romantic studies. Joey S. Kim is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toledo. She researches global Anglophone literature with a focus on eighteenth and nineteeth-century poetics and aesthetics.

• | Author: Joey Kim
• | Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• | Publication Date: Sep 30, 2023
• | Number of Pages: 192 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover
• | ISBN-10: 1399511254
• | ISBN-13: 9781399511254