| FA-58286-15 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Humberto Garcia | Romanticism Re-Oriented: Indian Authors and English Literary Culture, 1770-1830 | 8/1/2015 - 5/31/2016 | $42,000.00 | Humberto | | Garcia | | | | Vanderbilt University | Nashville | TN | 37203-2416 | USA | 2014 | English | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 42000 | 0 | 42000 | 0 |
Challenging Edward Said's assumption that the way Westerners represent the Occident to themselves is an unmediated reflection that occurred in isolation from non-Westerners, my book project argues that late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Indian authors redefined themselves by promoting a contrasting idea of the west that Britons and Europeans had not yet fully articulated circa 1800. This process of Asian self-definition was culturally mediated through their fusion of the English Oriental tale with Indo-Persian cultural, religious, and literary forms. Occidentalism was therefore not created uniquely in Europe and subsequently imposed elsewhere. In addition to revising postcolonial, eighteenth century, and Romantic literary studies, my project contributes to and benefits from the work of humanities scholars who study historical connections across national, religious, and geographical boundaries, and consider how intermediate brokers reconstituted these boundaries. |