Overview

Considering metropolitan and colonial cultural production as a “unitary field of analysis,” this book shows how tensions in the 1830s between utilitarian and Romantic perspectives on steam power marked meaningful divisions within the pervasive liberal imperialism of the period and generated divergent speculative fantasies, set in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, about the future of Indian nationalism. Poetry and fiction in Britain and Bengal engage with a Romantic strain of thought and sentiment according to which steam technology represents an anti-utilitarian humanization of nature. Within and against that frame and in uneven and different ways, writers in British India map a constellation of liberal values onto their hopes and fears concerning a future powered by steam.

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9783031607073

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Daniel E. White is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, Canada. He is the author of Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (2006) and From Little London to Little Bengal: Religion, Print, and Modernity in Early British India, 1793-1835 (2013), and co-editor of Robert Southey: Later Poetical Works, 1811-1838 (2012).

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