Brown Romantics

Manu Samriti Chander’s Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century is the kind of book that Romantic literary studies has needed for a very long time. Brown Romantics examines how and why poets from India, Guyana, and Australia placed themselves into conversation with authors now commonly associated with British Romanticism. The book significantly expands our understanding of canonical Romanticism’s transnational reach and revises critical commonplaces that have defined Romantic aesthetics since the nineteenth century. * Papers on Language and Literature *
This book has already provided a focal point for a new direction in Romantic studies, as emerging research clusters around its central claims. There’s no doubt that it will be looked back upon as a landmark work in Romantic studies. * Romantic Circles *
In calling for more sustained attention to precisely the kinds of “marginal” writers that Brown Romantics takes the time to read with care and sophistication, Chander points scholars of nineteenth-century literature toward a road less traveled, one that he shows by example—including an unusually personal “Afterword”—is worth traversing even, or perhaps especially, if we don’t know in advance where it leads. * Nineteenth-Century Literature *
In aspiring for “a more global Romanticism . . . that looks beyond the Anglophone world,” Brown Romantics challenges readers to rethink the play of race, religion, class, and nation across the nineteenth-century globe. * Victorian Studies *