Brown Romantics (Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650–1850)

Review
“Chander rightly calls for a focus on “how diverse readers read diverse texts” (100) that will reconstitute the field of anglophone Romanticism … This is the sharpest innovation of Brown Romantics and what it requires from the field is more scholarship toward a new literary history of empire. Chander shows that he understands the stakes, when he disarmingly describes his vital book as a “casting call for nineteenth-century poets of color” (107). It is a call that forces the question “what does it really take to count as a Romantic?.... [I]f literature scholars are going to understand empire, we are going to need to identify new reading publics and then reconcile them with the voluminous data provided by historians. Identifying those new literary cultures is the ambition of Manu Samriti Chander’s Brown Romantics and Nikki Hessell’s Romantic Literature and the Colo-nised World, two of the most important recent books published in Romanticism studies. The authors and publics they introduce and the methods they use to organize them should have profound consequences for how Romanticism defines itself as a field.
― European Romantic Review
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 Romanticstakes 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
Brown Romantics, a slim yet impressive volume, offers the capacious claim that we ought to rethink the scope of what we consider to be ‘Romantic’. Manu Samriti Chander boldly reaches beyond the terrestrial and temporal limits that have been placed on this designation, recovering the voices of those poet-legislators that have existed beyond the early nineteenth-century British Isles. ― Modern Language Review
Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century proceeds from the conviction that it is high time for the academy in general and scholars of European Romanticism to acknowledge the extensive international impact of Romantic poetry. Chander demonstrates the importance of Romantic notions of authorship to such poets as Henry Derozio (India), Egbert Martin (Guyana), and Henry Lawson (Australia), using the work of these poets, each prominent in the national cultural of his own country, to explain the crucial role that the Romantic myth of the poet qua legislator plays in the development of nationalist movements across the globe. The first study of its kind, Brown Romantics examines how each of these authors develop poetic means of negotiating such key issues as colonialism, immigration, race, and ethnicity.