{"product_id":"imperial-affliction","title":"Imperial Affliction","description":"«In many ways», Robert J.C. Young writes, «colonization from the very first carried with it the seeds of its own destruction.» \u003ci\u003eImperial Affliction\u003c\/i\u003e examines some ways in which Young’s observation could be applied to problems of subjectivity and influence within the colonizing nations themselves, particularly eighteenth-century Britain. How might these «seeds of destruction» manifest themselves as problems of identity? How might the very selves with greatest access to self-affirmation – the idea of the empire, the idea of British citizenry, the idea of the British self – actually find themselves vulnerable, confused, or damaged? \u003cbr\u003e Using multiple forms of postcolonial critique, this book turns back to salient eighteenth-century British lives and work for a different kind of enlightenment. Among its central subjects are the elusive subjectivity of William Collins; the exilic religious experience of William Cowper and its multiple readings in the twentieth century by a self-fashioned exilic, Donald Davie; the «missed encounter» between Christopher Smart and Samuel Johnson, and the ways in which that problem was re-inscribed in the work of W. Jackson Bate and Lionel Trilling; the problem of imperial fixity in James Cook’s journals with a view to Gray’s «Elegy» and Goldsmith’s «Deserted Village»; and the problem of purity as a paradoxically privileged and exilic force in the work of John Newton and Christopher Smart. In these explorations, this book illustrates both an expanded view of eighteenth-century colonial liabilities and a new emphasis on postcolonial critique as a means of exploring the fissures always present in imperial ambition.","brand":"Peter Lang Publishing Inc","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54223272640856,"sku":"9781433108723","price":85.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9781433108723.jpg?v=1777086012","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/imperial-affliction","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}