Nicolopulos (Spanish, U. of Texas-Austin) investigates the literary representation of 16th-century colonialism by analyzing Alonso de Ercilla's La Araucana, a narrative poem recounting the initial phases of the Spanish conquest of Chile, and Luis de Camoens' Os Lusiadas, an epic celebration of early Portuguese maritime expansion in and beyond the Indian Ocean. He also looks at how they reveal poetic, political, and commercial rivalries between Spain and Portugal at the time. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Statius' Silvae, written late in the reign of Domitian (AD 81–96), are a new kind of poetry that confronts the challenge of imperial majesty or private wealth by new poetic strategies and forms. As poems of praise, they delight in poetic excess whether they honour the emperor or the poet's friends. Yet extravagant speech is also capacious speech. It functions as a strategy for conveying the wealth and grandeur of villas, statues and precious works of art as well as the complex emotions aroused by the material and political culture of empire. The Silvae are the product of a divided, self-fashioning voice. Statius was born in Naples of non-aristocratic parents. His position as outsider to the culture he celebrates gives him a unique perspective on it. The Silvae are poems of anxiety as well as praise, expressive of the tensions within the later period of Domitian's reign.

Many well-known male writers produced fictions about colonial spaces and discussed the advantages of realism over romance, and vice versa, in the ‘art of fiction’ debate of the 1880s; but how did female writers contribute to colonial fiction? This volume links fictional, non-fictional and pictorial representations of a colonial otherness with the late nineteenth-century artistic concerns about representational conventions and possibilities. The author explores these texts and images through the postcolonial framework of ‘exoticism’, arguing that the epistemological dilemma of a ‘self’ encountering an ‘other’ results in the interrelated predicament to find poetic modalities – mimetic, realistic and documentary on the one hand; romantic, fantastic and picturesque on the other – that befit an ‘exotic’ representation. Thus women writers did not only participate in the making of colonial fictions but also in the late nineteenth-century artistic debate about the nature of fiction. This book maps the epistemological concerns of exoticism and of difference – self and other, home and away, familiarity and strangeness – onto the representational modes of realism and romance. The author focuses exclusively on female novelists, travel writers and painters of the turn-of-the-century exotic, and especially on neglected authors of academically under-researched genres such as the bestselling novel and the travelogue.

The Imperial Sublime examines the rise of the Russian empire as a literary theme simultaneous with the evolution of Russian poetry between the 1730s and 1840—the century during which poets defined the main questions facing Russian literature and society. Harsha Ram shows how imperial ideology became implicated in an unexpectedly wide range of issues, from formal problems of genre, style, and lyric voice to the vexed relationship between the poet and the ruling monarch.

First published in 1764, The Sugar Cane is a major work in the history of Anglophone Caribbean literature. It is the only poem written in the Caribbean before the twentieth century to achieve a place in the Western 'canon'. Grainger wrote a "West India Georgic", challenging assumptions about poetic diction and the proper subject matter of poetry, and boldly asserting the importance of the Caribbean to the eighteenth-century British empire. This is the first reliable text and critical study of the poem, setting it within the context of Grainger's life and work. -- Book cover.

This ambitious book investigates a major yet underexplored nexus of themes in Roman cultural history: the evolving tropes of enclosure, retreat and compressed space within an expanding, potentially borderless empire. In Roman writers' exploration of real and symbolic enclosures - caves, corners, villas, bathhouses, the 'prison' of the human body itself - we see the aesthetic, philosophical and political intersecting in fascinating ways, as the machine of empire is recast in tighter and tighter shapes. Victoria Rimell brings ideas and methods from literary theory, cultural studies and philosophy to bear on an extraordinary range of ancient texts rarely studied in juxtaposition, from Horace's Odes, Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Ibis, to Seneca's Letters, Statius' Achilleid and Tacitus' Annals. A series of epilogues puts these texts in conceptual dialogue with our own contemporary art world, and emphasizes the role Rome's imagination has played in the history of Western thinking about space, security and dwelling.

Wai Chee Dimock approaches Herman Melville not as a timeless genius, but as a historical figure caught in the politics of an imperial nation and an "imperial self." She challenges our customary view by demonstrating a link between the individualism that enabled Melville to write as a sovereign author and the nationalism that allowed America to grow into what Jefferson hoped would be an "empire for liberty."