Oriental Wells
Oriental Wells

Author: Md. Monirul Islam

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-10-15

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9389812534

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Oriental Wells explores the manifold ways in which the East was a major source of inspiration for the British Romantic poets, who generously borrowed from the Eastern sources in their effort to reinvent the British poetic tradition. It examines the “orientalization” of Romantic poetry, using works of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Walter Savage Landor. Analyzing the Romantic poets' multifaceted engagement with the East, the book raises the questions: · What led Blake to formulate his thesis that “All Religions Are One”? · Why do Coleridge's poetry and the play Osorio echo some of the passages from Wilkins' translation of The Bhagvat-Geeta as well as other prominent Eastern religious texts? · What made Southey write his “Hindu epic” The Curse of Kehama and his “Islamic” tale Thalaba, the Destroyer? · What was the exact nature of the negotiations between William Jones' Orientalism and Wordsworth's poetics as formulated in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, The Prelude, and other poems? The book convincingly argues that the introduction of “cultural goods” from the East played a crucial role in shaping the form and substance of British Romanticism, while acknowledging that the Romantics' reception of the East was tempered by their ideological concerns and religious background.

Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures
Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures

Author: Debashish Banerji

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-10-07

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 8132236378

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This volume is a critical exploration of multiple posthuman possibilities in the 21st century and beyond. Due to the global engagement with advanced technology, we are witness to a species-wise blurring of boundaries at the edge of the human. On the one hand, we find ourselves in a digital age in which human identity is being transformed through networked technological intervention, a large part of our consciousness transferred to "smart" external devices. On the other hand, we are assisted---or assailed---by an unprecedented proliferation of quasi-human substitutes and surrogates, forming a spectrum of humanoids with fuzzy borders. Under these conditions, critical posthumanism asks, who will occupy and control our planet: Will the "superhuman" merely serve as another sign under which new regimes of dominance are spread across the earth? Or can we discover or invent technologies of existence to counter such dominance? It is issues such as these which are at the heart of this new volume of explorations of the posthuman. The essays in this volume offer leading-edge thought on the subject, with special emphases on postmodern and postcolonial futures. They engage with questions of subalternity and feminism vis-à-vis posthumanism, dealing with issues of subjugation, dispensability and surrogacy, as well as the possibilities of resistance, ethical politics or subjective transformation from South Asian archives of cultural and spiritual practice. This volume is a valuable addition to the on-going global dialogues on posthumanism, indispensable to those, from across several disciplines, who are interested in postcolonial and planetary futures.