Exotic Settings and Motifs in the Poetry of the British Romantic Period - Research Paper Example

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure dome decree . . . Discuss the treatment and significance of exotic settings and motifs in the poetry of the British romantic period. Introduction to the Poem & the Period Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge is a representative poem of the romantic period through one of its traits of exotic settings and motifs, traceable in the poetry of the period. The title of the poem, “Kubla Khan” relates to the name of a king in Xanadu, the province at Shantung in China, the founder of the 20th Chinese Mongol dynasty (BU, 2013). The romantic period of British English literature is full of the element of Romanticism, as literature is a reflection of all that is free-flowing and unimpressed in nature and in man, following its own imagination in its own right. In Coleridge, this freedom is visible through the populous orient in "Kubla Khan". Kubla Khan is both poetic and philosophical. One of his later poems, "Kubla Khan" feels like a painting of a gorgeous Oriental dream picture of an October sunset (Gutenberg, 2013). The exotic settings of the romantic period have come from the “romantic orientalism” where the letters, poems, and prose play upon the ideas enveloped by the notion of “romantic orientalism.” The peculiar exoticism of the period is described also as “Oriental exoticism” or “Oriental fantasy”, the other synonymic phrases used to describe the romantic period. Both the phrases combine together two notions that have created complexity among theorists and literary historians. For practical reasons, "Romantic" mean the writers of the Romantic Period of English Literature during 1785–1830, while "Orientalism" denotes the location and culture of greater parts of Asia and North Africa, beside some regions of Eastern Europe. From a British perspective, "Orientalism" denotes foreign lands — things surely not British — and it sometimes gives the feeling as if the "East" represented by "Orient" is not only the east of Europe and the Mediterranean but everything on the eastern side of the English Channel (Carey, 2013, p. 1). In literary history, Romantic Orientalism is the reemergence of identifiable locations of Asian and African place names, historical and legendary people, religions, philosophies, art, architecture, interior decoration, costume, and much more in the compositions of the British Romantics. At first appearance, Romantic literature may look to be segmented between the natural environs of sheep farms in the southwest of England or the Lake District and the unnatural environs of medieval palaces that are, for all their forlornness from ongoing time, always Christian and at the minimum European, if ever British. But a nearer glance shows a tiger — for sure not inhabiting in the British Isles — in one of Blake's most renowned songs; an impact-creating dream of “an Arab of the Bedouin Tribes” in book 5 of Wordsworth's Prelude; the founder of the Mongol kingdom in China and an Abyssinian “damsel with a dulcimer” in Coleridge's “Kubla Khan”; Eastern story-lines, role-plays, and themes in Byron's “Oriental tales,” some of which appear afterwards in Don Juan; a poet's walk into the deepest regions of the Caucasus (the legendary borders between Europe and Asia) in Percy Shelley's Alastor; a luring affair with an Indian maiden in Keats's “Endymion” and a party full of “dainties” from Fez, Samarcand, and Lebanon in “The Eve of St. Agnes”; an Arab maiden, Safie, as the most free character in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Orientalism, through the literature and art of the time, was incensing the air with its fragrance in both London and the British village-side (Carey, 2013). It was in the first decade of the eighteenth century when the Orientalism of the British Romantic literature started germinating with the initial translations of The Arabian Nights into English (from a copy in French, 1705–08). The favorable response of The Arabian Nights encouraged writers to try a new genre, the Oriental tale, of which Samuel Johnson's History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759)) was the ideal mid-century example. Growth of Romantic Orientalism into the nineteenth century, happened concurrently with another trait of Romanticism already available in the Norton Web sites, “Literary Gothicism.” ...Similar to Gothic novels and dramas, Oriental stories reveal exotic settings, supernatural occurrences, and exhibitive revelation of happening, role, style, emotion, and language — a revelation sometimes opposed by wry humor even to the limit of jeering. It was like the “otherness” of Oriental environs and roles providing the staid British attitude a break. Gothicism and Orientalism perform the job of story-writing more generally — through unreal characters, situations, and fiction as secondary to, even as run-away from the reader's routine actuality. The difference is that their actions are relatively eye-catching to other kinds of fiction. Entertaining terror and enjoyable exoticism are aroused experiences, with pure imagination and extra-ordinariness at the center of both (Carey, 2013, p. 1). A sudden change of perspectives occurred in the attitudes of intellectuals over Eastern places, characters, and happenings in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century British literature after the publishing of Edward Said's totally encompassing, impressive and complicating Orientalism (1978)), which was a little more than stimuli for comfy thrills; this behavior underwent a sudden change. Besides its well-researched interests in the inner functioning of the mind, relationship with nature, and operating of a spiritual imagination, the Romantic Period in Britain was known as a time of worldwide roaming and finding, accession of colonies across the globe, and nourishing of expansionist ideologies, which provided logic to the British acquisition of far-away lands (Carey, 2013). On the surface, a touch and feel of exotic settings and motifs just offered a change from the routine poetic elements, but a serious digging into the occurrence of exoticism in British poetry of the romantic period by Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh in the introduction to their selected collection of essays in Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834 (1996)), reveal pointers to the Spanish “discovery” and dig-in of the Americas, British colonial wars, and “ethnographic exoticism” in many shorter pieces of Lyrical Ballads (1798) and relate to the Ancient Mariner's voyage to an increasing sea-side kingdom of far-away islands, trading-posts, and extension in the coastline on five continents. Wordsworth and Coleridge were increasingly knowledgeable of British expansionism than was the available general awareness (The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 2013). As both Wordsworth and Coleridge were the leading torch-bearers of the romantic poetry, one can fathom how and why exotic locations became critically significant in the poetry of the romantic period. Revealing of such a re-contextualizing of Romantic Orientalism provides it certain happening and political feel where national identities, cultural traits, the ethic of imperialistic expansionism, and resultant eagerness and guilt related to such issues had come to the forefront, raising eye-brows. An easy to state example was the invitation for papers at a global meet on the issue at Gregynog, Wales, in July 2002, the center of which was the cultural, political, business, and spiritual extensions of the development of Romanticism and Orientalism at the same length. The European Romantic fancy was optimized with Orientalism, but it showed continuity in ambivalence relating the East, creating complexities in Britain from colonial eagerness and rulers’ guilt. This literary discussion of the oriental connection has just started; it would be further analyzed by critics and theorists on how Western concepts of cultural hegemony were empowered by expansionary rhetoric and questioned through intercultural translation. Publishing of various new books and articles on this topic is a proof of a concurrently awarded political dimension to Romantic Orientalism, as one of the leading responsibilities of critics and theorists (The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 2013). It may seem taking things too far in searching and relating exotic settings and motifs in the poetry of the romantic period, but considering that any literary work reveals the political, social, cultural, and other contexts, one cannot ignore the inclusion of oriental environs and motifs in the political environment of the British romantic period. That’s why colonial eagerness and royal guilt may not be instantly visible in the works gathered from Frances Sheridan's History of Nourjahad, Sir Willliam Jones's Palace of Fortune and Hymn to Narayena, Clara Reeve's History of Charoba, Queen of Ægypt, William Beckford's Vathek, W. S. Landor's Gebir, Robert Southey's Curse of Kehama, Byron's Giaour, and Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh. All these works represent the contents that researchers are working with, and three of them — the contributions by Sheridan, Beckford, and Byron — have lately been republished in a New Riverside Edition, Three Oriental Tales (2002)), with an introduction and notes by Alan Richardson pointing out the works' use of ‘Oriental' motifs to critique European social settings. The works and extra background contents included in this topic beautify the reading of canonical Romantic poems and fictions, besides highlighting how those poems and fictions relate to the political and social issues of their actual historical contexts (The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 2013). A reading of W.B. Yeats’ early poetic drama reveals among other elements exotic settings as well. Yeats had acknowledged that he was very much impressed from Shelley as a poet. Yeats was equally forthcoming in acknowledging a debt to Blake. At a later stage in his life, he clarified that it was not Shelley but Blake who played a significant role in impacting his works. Blake enriched Yeats’ writing in different ways but it was the idealism of Shelley posing a challenge, which could possibly be one of the reasons of Yeats's early verse drama framed in different worlds with exotic, mostly magical characters (Boston College Libraries, 2011). Not one or two, romantic writers in almost all cultures were lured of the exotic by making a flight over their fanciful skies, spatially and chronologically. It was because of the spirit of the new freedom. For themes and environs they looked backwards to the Middle Ages (12th century to 15th century) and were over-impressed from the folk culture, national and ethnic cultural origins (The France of Victor Hugo, 1999). Romantic period saw a journey of the exotic from a commodity, a sign of oriental comfort product to a kind of awareness over the mythological characters of the Asian settings. “By 1800, orientalism had been transformed from the status of an exotic mercantilist commodity--a token of oriental luxury--into a form of knowledge which incorporated the iconography and mythology of Britain's Asiatic subjects into the nation's image repertoire, in precisely the manner demanded by William Jones,” Leask, as cited by Khan (2008, p. 6). Exotic became increasingly mature, ethnographically and culturally informed as well as high on critical differentiation, thus turning to be more genuine and original. This conclusion has been derived on the basis of academic research that went into the making of oriental poems and fictions and the lengthy footnotes provided (Khan, 2008, p. 6). Not all romantic poets’ compositions exhibited the exotic element. Shelley’s romantic orientalism was far from being realistic and it ruled out division in terms of the elements of routine cultural conventions. This segregates Shelley from the line of other romantic poets such as Southey, Byron or Moore. His search of the oriental romances like Alastor, The Revolt of Islam and Prometheus Unbound are all internalized versions of the theatrical cultural face-offs happening in the dream world and showing a psychological desire for the soul within a soul (Khan, 2008). Nature offered the medium to the romantics to escape from the drudgeries of life into a promising world. Past also offered them a path to escape. The romantics were strongly attracted by the far-away, the exotic, and the mysterious. They were attracted towards the supernatural and fanciful world, of the past and distant. They rediscovered the heritage of the Middle Ages, gathered folk songs and stories, and made attempts to dream. Thus, various new ways revealed wider new interests. It filled into the art forms vigor and desire to experiment that laid the basis for exotic settings and motifs among other numerous later developments (Furst, 2013). Coleridge’s Kubla Khan was also one such poem whose setting was made in the Asian environ of Xanadu (Romanticism, 2013). Conclusion Thus, romanticism was a period of change-over from faith in reason to faith in feelings, expressions, and fanciful flights. This change was seen in various natural elements, exotic being one of the elements (Odessa, 2013). The discussion over the presence of exotic settings and motif leads to the origin and connection of these elements with such terms, as romantic orientalism, also named as oriental exoticism or oriental fantasy, which includes all that is on the eastern side of the English channel. Romantic literature gives the impression of a European environment initially, but later it gets revealed that the impression of orient is visible in the poems of all leading poets of the period. It all started with The Arabian Nights, the success of which prompted other composers to try their hands at similar elements like gothic literature. It offered a possibility to the British poets to take a break from their routine compositions. Certain political realities of the period, such as accession of colonies and expansionism also supported the flight of fancy in forlorn locations of the East, thus depicting the social and cultural shift, happening actually to authenticate the poetic use of exotic settings. Shelley offered an exception to the trend through his oriental romances, which projected internalized versions of the dramatic cultural challenge of the dream world and a desire for spirituality. Overall, the romantic period represented the actual social, political, and cultural changes through the exotic settings and oriental motifs. References Boston College Libraries. (2011). W.B. Yeats & the romantics. Available from: http://www.bc.edu/sites/libraries/loveanddeath/romantics.html [Accessed 27 October 2013]. BU. (2013). Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Kubla Khan. Bharathiar University. Available from: http://www.b-u.ac.in/sde_book/ma_lit2.pdf [Accessed 27 October 2013]. Carey, C. (2013). Romantic Poets and “Romantic Orientalism”. World Literature. Available from: http://www.craigcarey.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Romantic-Orientialism-Packet.pdf [Accessed 27 October 2013]. Furst, L.R. (2013). Romanticism (late 1700s-mid 1800s). Romanticism in Perspective. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Available from: http://www.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=3753923 [Accessed 27 October 2013]. Gutenberg. (2013). Chapter X: The Age of Romanticism (1800-1850). Available from: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10609/10609-h/10609-h.htm#chap10e [Accessed 27 October 2013]. Khan, J. U. (2008). Shelley's orientalia: Indian elements in his poetry. Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies (AEDEAN). Literature Resource Center. Gale Group. [Accessed 27 October 2013]. Odessa. (2013). Characteristics of romantic literature. Available from: http://www.odessa.edu/dept/english/dsmith/rom.lit.char.pdf [Accessed 27 October 2013]. Romanticism. (2013). 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