The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

   PDF

2. Introduction: The Other East

   • Thomas McLean

   Pages 1-13

3. ‘That Woman, Lovely Woman! May Have Dominion’: Catherine the Great and Poland

   • Thomas McLean

   Pages 14-40

4. ‘A Patriot’s Furrow’d Cheek’: British Responses to the 1794 Kościuszko Uprising

   • Thomas McLean

   Pages 41-65

5. Hero between Genres: Jane Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw

   • Thomas McLean

   Pages 66-87

6. ‘Transform’d, Not Inly Alter’d’: The Resurrection of Kościuszko and the Arrival of Mazeppa

   • Thomas McLean

   Pages 88-113

7. Climate Change: Britain and Poland, 1830–49

   • Thomas McLean

   Pages 114-134

8. Arms and the Circassian Woman

   • Thomas McLean

   Pages 135-153

9. Picturing Will: Middlemarch and the Victorian Genealogy of the Polish Hero

   • Thomas McLean

   Pages 154-169

10. Afterword: Conrad’s Poles

    • Thomas McLean

    Pages 170-172

11. Back Matter

    Pages 173-203

    PDF

The Polish exile and the Russian villain were familiar figures in nineteenth-century British culture. This book restores the significance of Eastern Europe to nineteenth-century British literature, offering new readings of Blake's Europe , Byron's Mazeppa , and Eliot's Middlemarch , and recovering influential works by Thomas Campbell and Jane Porter.

• culture
• English literature
• Europe
• Great Britain
• William Blake
• British and Irish Literature

"Turning to the profound but largely overlooked impact of Eastern Europe and Northern Asia on British literature and culture of the nineteenth century, The Other East compels us to consider another imaginative locus of the Empire on which the sun never set. The book's sensitive treatment of Poland and Russia as they are imagined and used in well-known and understudied works by the likes of Blake, Byron, Campbell, Coleridge, Conrad, Eliot, and Wollstonecraft will have scholars and students rethinking what we thought we knew about the global perspectives and reach of this era's literature. Thomas McLean's impeccably researched, highly persuasive, and original book is at once a formidable contribution to our scholarship and a delight to read." - Devoney Looser, Professor of English, University of Missouri Columbia, USA

"Thomas McLean's The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Imagining Poland and the Russian Empire is another contribution to postcolonial studies that addresses an often-overlooked strand of British imperial discourse its representation of Eastern Europe. McLean examines the 'evolving image of the Polish exile' (p. 2) in relation to the Russian Empire in works by such Romantic and Victorian writers as Blake, Coleridge, Byron, Mary Shelley, Alfred Tennyson, George Eliot, and Conrad." - Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

"...a valuable introduction to this under-researched area of nineteenth-century literary history." - Jan J?drzejewski, New Zealand Slavonic Journal

• University of Otago, New Zealand

  Thomas McLean

THOMAS McLEAN is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century British Literature at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He is the editor of Further Letters of Joanna Baillie (2010).

Policies and ethics