Joey S. Kim, Romanticism and the Poetics of Orientation
With the increasing globalization of literary studies, it is unsurprising that there should emerge numerous revisionist perspectives on previous forms of appropriation and erasure. While “literature” itself might be regarded as an embattled if not discarded concept, “British” or even “in English” might be equally contested. A debunking of traditional narratives and established canon might be anticipated, though it is perhaps less obvious what might replace them. Kim’s study opens with a consideration of “orientation” as spatial coordinate and sexual preference, followed by chapters on the evolution of the lyric subject (through Jones, Coleridge, and Shelley), on cosmopolitanism in Byron’s Eastern Tales, on female racialization in Hemans and Wheatley, and finally—and presumably of most interest to readers of this journal—on Blake, primarily The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Jerusalem.