Peter Kitson

• BA, PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of East Anglia

Cambridge Core - English Literature: General Interest - English Literature in Context - edited by Paul Poplawski

In her new and very timely discussion of the postcolonial contexts and interpretations of Romantic period writing, Elizabeth Bohls draws attention to the remarkable progress made in this field over the last ten years or so: ‘there is now a general consensus that the fact of empire and its effects are fundamental to the study of Romantic culture’ (p...

China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined. By Ross G. Forman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 318 pp. ISBN 9781107013155 (cloth). - Volume 75 Issue 1 - Peter J. Kitson

This chapter sketches the magnitude of John Milton's influence on the Romantics as patriot and poet, discussing the impact of his life, his political persona, his theodicy in Paradise Lost and his depiction of Satan, the character most fascinating to the Romantic poets. Crucially, Milton was a revolutionary poet for a revolutionary age, a poet who...

This essay deals with the presence of Chinese visitors in London from the 1750s onwards. Its focus is on the discourses of hospitality, cosmopolitanism, gift-exchange, and linguistic exchanges that were involved in these seldom discussed encounters between Britons and Chinese. While the dominant and paradigmatic textual encounter of the period rema...

The case of the Great Wall of China viewed within the larger context of early British understandings of Qing China significantly complicates in interesting ways our understanding of Enlightenment and Romantic period travel writing. This essay discusses the first British encounter with the Great Wall in the accounts of the Macartney embassy of 1792–...

In the 1790s S. T. Coleridge was a Dissenter in both politics and religion. Numerous critics have discussed the nature of Coleridge’s then Unitarian beliefs, but what has so far insufficiently been highlighted are the ways in which his dissent was fashioned, deepened, and reinforced by the poet’s West Country background, specifically the political...

The term 'Romanticism' is usually used to describe a literary and philosophical movement that occurred in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. The term is often used to distinguish the thought and literature of the period from that of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or of the 'Enlightenment', and the expressions 'E...

Milton as Patriot and Republican HeroNatural SupernaturalismRomantic and Miltonic SatanismMilton and Women Romantic Writers

In recent years Romantic period studies have been transformed by the application of critical approaches deriving from post-colonial critical perspectives to the writing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. What we describe as the Romantic Movement coincided with the beginnings of a modern British imperialism which involved the gov...

This chapter is focused on the European fascination with a different other from those which are at the present time more commonly discussed in Romantic scholarship, the Celestial Empire of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912). The Qing Empire was certainly a debatable and much debated land in the mid- to late eighteenth century. The Qing was debated in dif...

The focus of this first chapter has been narrowed to consider the importance of one of the languages of racism from the mid-eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century, that is, “classic racism,” the “racism of ideology” or “scientific racism.” This involves the affirmation in scientific and literary discourses that humanity can be divided i...

In chapter 5, I discussed the changing discourse of China and the extent to which this was affected, or even caused by racial thinking. The focus of that chapter was on historical, diplomatic, travel and missionary writing rather than literary texts. The emphasis in this chapter is more firmly placed on literary texts. There is not a great deal of...

The new Comparative Anatomy was a Romantic science. It was also a racial science, possibly the most racial of all the newly emerging professional and scientific disciplines of the early nineteenth century. It is significant that Britain’s first permanent chair of comparative anatomy was given to Robert E. Grant, one of the main proponents of the ne...

In describing the natural world, Enlightenment and Romantic natural philosophers may well, for the most part, have been attempting to assert a Baconian objectivity and disinterestedness in their work in trying to describe the world as they saw it. With the privilege of hindsight we can see how their works were infiltrated with assumptions and preju...

The two chapters that follow are focused on the European fascination with the Celestial Empire of the Qing dynasty and its charismatic and exotic ruler, Hongli, the Qianlong Emperor. Like the other chapters in the book they take as their theme the grammar of race and the ways in which the language of race thinking entwined with other critical disco...

This chapter moves the focus of the debate about human difference in the Romantic period away from the anatomy theaters and far from the transatlantic concern with the slave trade to another crucial area of geographical discovery, exploration, and exploitation, the area now known as “Oceania,” but usually referred to in the period and after as the...

In a fresh investigation of primary sources and original readings, Kitson traces the origins of contemporary ideas about race though a variety of late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth century literary texts by Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, De Quincey, and other published and unpublished writings about travel and exploration and natural history.

The ‘race’ issue, the origins of the ‘race’ idea and its growth, articulation, and continued pervasiveness, is one that preoccupies a great deal of contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Historians of race and slavery have noted that there is a congruence between the development of a systematized sense of human difference in the natural scie...

This chapter focuses on the place of the body in cultural discourses of the Romantic era, particularly the meanings and symbolism of human bodies eating other human bodies in the area called the “the South Seas.” It attempts to show how this practice distinguished between varieties, then races, of humans who inhabited this region. Enlightenment emp...

In 1768, Captain James Cook made the most important scientific voyage of the eighteenth century. He was not alone: scores of explorers like Cook, travelling in the name of science, brought new worlds and new peoples within the horizon of European knowledge for the first time. Their discoveries changed the course of science. Old scientific disciplin...

Much recent criticism of the reformist and dissenting politics of the 1790s has stressed the fact that radical writers attempted to manufacture a transparent prose style in which to propagate political ideas.1 It is generally argued that this was in reaction against Edmund Burke’s use of a rhetoric of the sublime and his appropriation of the mode o...

This series draws together a representative selection of early travel writing. The first part includes Romantic-period texts dating from the first publishing boom of popular writings on travel. The second part presents contemporaneous accounts of travels in the Victorian era, when British colonialism was approaching its zenith.

ELH 67.2 (2000) 515-537 Representation of racial difference is common in the writing of the British Romantic period, largely for two reasons. First, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed the beginnings of the sustained British imperial expansion that was to dominate the nation's history. This expansion occasioned a sometimes...

It is widely supposed that the industrializing regions of north-west England (Lancashire and the West Riding) experienced a rapid increase in the relative importance of secondary sector employment between 1760 and 1830. However a large-scale analysis of occupational data for the period 1750-1871 shows that in fact the rise in the relative importanc...