REVIEWS
“Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger is a wonderfully engaged and engaging book. Compelling and elegant at every turn, it is widely and deeply informed, addressing an enormous and varied Romantic archive while also demonstrating a masterful grasp of contemporary theoretical discussions about strangers and strangeness. A searching and felicitous intelligence quickens the project from its expansive beginning to its deeply moving conclusion. Written with uncommon purposiveness, David Simpson’s powerfully realized book may be rooted in Romanticism but it tells a history of vexed encounters with others through which we are still living.”
— David Clark, McMaster University
“With his astonishing range of reference, David Simpson offers a powerful literary history and theory of ‘the stranger syndrome,’ the subtle dialectic of hostility and hospitality in Romanticism and its early-twenty-first-century afterlife. Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger encompasses the wide and eclectic field of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century writing, not just the authors and texts most often associated with the period. In examples both surprising and revelatory, Simpson’s study also reveals the ubiquity and variety of the stranger, who appears not only in the form of alien persons but also in less obvious guises: in practices of translation between languages, attempts at religious conversion, footnotes and other paratext, metaphor, and the nature of literary language itself. As in his earlier work, Simpson writes at once as a prominent literary scholar and an incisive public intellectual, and in both capacities, he issues a forceful warning against failing to ‘reckon with the stranger,’ whether by acts of exclusion, by making distinctions and patrolling their boundaries, or by suspecting the stranger from outside while failing to recognize the strangeness and estrangement inside—within the self, home, or homeland.”
— Kevis Goodman, University of California, Berkeley
“Simpson makes for an expert guide, his deft and dynamic analysis forging unexpected pathways through the familiar terrain of Romantic writing, and his notion of the stranger supplying an illuminating new lens through which to re-perceive the Romantic canon. Where the book excels, though, is in its quietly insistent sense of the pertinence of Romantic writing and the conviction with which it makes its case for the Romantic claim to modernity. . . . This is an unusual book, sometimes odd, always rewarding, illuminating in its analysis and dexterous in its range. . . . It is the kind of book that encourages the reader’s speculations to stray from home, extending in directions beyond its own Romantic literary remit. As Simpson’s provocative readings illustrate, the question of the stranger might concern not only those mysterious others whom we hold off at the hearth but also that which we refuse to recognise within.”
— Times Higher Education Book of the Week
“Stunning in its breadth and bold in its implications. . . . A compelling and, it is worth saying, hopeful work.”
— Studies in Romanticism
“A serious and impressive piece of scholarly criticism, with breadth and ambition, but also an admirable underpinning coherence.”
— Year’s Work in English Studies
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
After 9/11: The Ubiquity of Others - David Simpson
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226922362.003.0001
[stranger syndrome, stranger, alien, John C. Miller, Crisis in Freedom, Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves]
After the events of 9/11, the world was said to have changed forever. There is a question of how the world changed, exactly, and how it affected the consciousness of the human race. Did it change merely for America or for some larger sector of the world? This chapter looks at the concept of the stranger and the stranger syndrome. The stranger may or may not be foreign in terms of distance, but may also be local—as in someone who was previously familiar but is now alien or estranged. How did the figure of the stranger play into this post 9/11 world, or even before it? Certain authors and their books are gleamed for their insights on the matter, such as John C. Miller’s Crisis in Freedom (1951) or Julia Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves (1991). Each book gives a representation of historical, philosophical and sometimes polemical contexts for the questions that surround the stranger or the alien. (pages 1 - 15)
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Theorizing Strangers: A Very Long Romanticism - David Simpson
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226922362.003.0002
[stranger rhetorical, stranger political, William Wordsworth, The Prelude, September Massacres, The Bacchae, Oedipus at Colonus]
William Wordsworth’s The Prelude provides a glimpse of the experience of the stranger. It talks of his trip to France in 1790 where the hospitality he received made him feel very much at home. By late 1792, however, things turned sour when Wordsworth travelled back to England by way of Paris. It was the “September Massacres” that soiled and, to him, brutalized France itself. These feelings of belonging and rejection constitute the stranger. This chapter explores the stranger political and the stranger rhetorical, focusing on France’s political trifles and how it affected the reception towards the stranger—both foreign and local. It recalls the classic-pagan and the Judeo-Christian as cultures where the stranger emerged long before 1789. Works such as Euripedes’s The Bacchae and Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus play in part a vindication of prudent behaviour by hosts towards guests. (pages 16 - 53)
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Hearth and Home: Coleridge, De Quincey, Austen - David Simpson
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226922362.003.0003
[stranger, Coleridge, Jane Austen, Thomas De Quincey, Orientalization, Frost at Midnight, Confessions of An English Opium Eater, Sense and Sensibility]
Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” contains references to the stranger in the sense that the stranger seems not to be strange but rather familiar—imagined as a friend whose presence is desired. This presents a paradox as to how a stranger can be a friend and why a friend would be called a stranger. The chapter also discusses Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of An English Opium Eater where De Quincy receives a visit from the stranger and receives him as an uncanny companionate spirit or double. In this, De Quincey reveals his own Orientalization—something he deeply resists. When this Malay traveler apparently speaks no English, and De Quincey no Malay, they agree to pretend to understand, thus creating a minimal social relation, giving readers a glimpse of such a foreign experience. Finally, the chapter also looks novels such as Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen to divulge a sense of the stranger within her characters. (pages 54 - 81)
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Friends and Enemies in Walter Scott’s Crusader Novels - David Simpson
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226922362.003.0004
[Walter Scott, Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Ivanhoe, The Bethrothed, The Talisman, refusal to convert, radical differences, Jews, Saracens]
This chapter first takes a look at Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice to provide an overview of the relations, tension, and binary distinction between the Christian and the Jew, the friend and the enemy, the self and the other. By examining the roles and relationship between Shylock and Antonio, the chapter is able to relate it to other similar and reversed roles that have emerged in literature, particularly those in Walter Scott’s works, Ivanhoe, The Bethrothed, and The Talisman. These works reflect Scott’s task of creating a national history. His Invanhoe shows Richard the Lionheart to have been as comfortable in exploiting and punishing Jews as doing battle with Saracens, a quality that does not make him very much removed from his predecessor Henry II. Thus the chapter explores the politics in Scott’s works: his insistence on the integrity of the refusal to convert, or his refusal to suggest that tolerating radical differences is possible. (pages 82 - 108)
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Small Print and Wide Horizons - David Simpson
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226922362.003.0005
[footnotes, endnotes, T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, stranger, addenda, Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance, The Golden Bough]
This chapter examines footnotes, endnotes, and the marginal glosses that constitute the fiction and poetry that speak of the stranger. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land for example, included footnotes that pose a challenge. How are we to read them? Are they referential, merely addenda, or a vital part of the poem? Eliot himself suggested that his own notes aerere merely pale reflections of the sources that he drew inspiration from. In other words, for those who truly wanted to know the meaning behind the poem, additional reading would be required. Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance and Frazer’s The Golden Bough also exhibit the same characteristic in their poetry. This is simply one aspect of the appearance of small print in poetry. The rest of the chapter explores the other uses and challenges that these marks provide. (pages 109 - 143)
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Strange Words: The Call to Translation - David Simpson
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226922362.003.0006
[task of translation, metaphor, romantic formulation, Schleiemacher, Schriftsteller, Leser]
This chapter focuses on the task of translation, and how language and its diverse forms and kinds always set limits to an understanding of a piece of fiction or poetry. The metaphor is intricately coexistent with translation in the sense that metaphor, like translation, makes the stranger familiar and the familiar strange. The most famous romantic formulation of the task of translation is Schleiemacher’s—wherein the purpose it to either bring the author (Schriftsteller) to the reader (Leser) or the reader to the author. It has always been a lonely task to undergo the process of translating texts written in Greek or Aramaic into a language that can be understood today. Whatever attempt there has been at translation always has its share of consequences. The chapter tackles the problems and challenges—whether cultural, political, or otherwise—that are inherent in translation. (pages 144 - 178)
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Hands across the Ocean: Slavery and Sociability - David Simpson
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226922362.003.0007
[Antelope, George Keate, Zong, Luke Collingwood, slavery, sociability, Thomas Rose, Captain Henry Wilson]
George Keate’s account of the voyage of the East India Company ship Antelope, under the command of Captain Henry Wilson, provides a brief example of a conversational relationship between strangers. In this case, it’s between the Europeans and their Malay crew. Thomas Rose, a linguist and native of Bengal, was the key to the avoidance of the great potential for misconceptions and misunderstandings between crew members. The chapter explores another account that experienced a wholly different outcome. In September 1781, two years before the Antelope was wrecked in the Pelew Islands, Luke Collingwood, master of the slave ship Zong was sailing for Jamaica, en route from West Africa. Due to a claimed water shortage by Collingwood, slaves were killed in an attempt to win the insurance on the slaves. These two cases provide the benchmark for discussions in this chapter regarding the issues of slavery and sociability, and their relation to the concept of translation, and the stranger. (pages 179 - 208)
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Strange Women - David Simpson
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226922362.003.0008
[Leslie Fiedler, unassimilable, Medea, Medusa, Cleopatra, Morgan La Fay, strange women, Sydney Owenson, treatment towards women]
Leslie Fiedler, in 1972, identified woman as “an unassimilated, perhaps forever unassimilable, stranger, the first other of which the makers of our myths, male as far back as reliable memory runs, ever became aware.” Her statement provides the groundwork for the chapter in exploring the instances in which women have become the stranger. Throughout literary history, indeed, several figures emerge that fit into Fiedler’s statement: Medea, Medusa, Cleopatra, Morgan La Fay, and many others. The chapter explores the instances wherein women are portrayed in violence and estrangement over the dominant male, and also shows literature that explore in terms of the possibilities and limits of accepting and integrating fully strange women. Such works, in this instance include two novels by Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan). Thus through the exploration of the history of treatment towards women, the chapter shows the differences made ten years after 9/11 and notes how far the pendulum has swung. (pages 209 - 248)
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Bibliography
Index
