Abstracts
Abstract
My essay claims that Robert Southey uses Hinduism to fashion a poetics of Romantic-era technology in The Curse of Kehama (1810). In his neglected Sir Thomas More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829), Southey compares the manufacturing system to Indian theology and ritual, a metaphor that relativizes religion and technology while implying that the Industrial Revolution amounts to a new breed of religious network. Southey next likens the emergent world order made possible by such technologies to the cosmic ambitions of Kehama, his own Indian tyrant-cum-demigod. The Colloquies thus suggests an allegorical reading of The Curse of Kehama, whereby this tale of a king bent on cosmic rule simultaneously explores how technological and imperial networks intertwine. Accordingly, I draw from metaphor theory to read the earlier Kehama as a repository of veiled comparisons and displacements through which Southey glimpses the magnitude of the Industrial Revolution. Just as Indian wealth propels the techno-imperial enterprise described in the Colloquies, Kehama’s paganism supplies the raw discursive material through which Southey fashions a poetics of manufacturing. Read alongside the Colloquies, Kehama aestheticizes the connection between imperial and technological systems, expresses the imaginative significance of twinned manufacturing novelties—the steam engine and coke smelting—and concretizes the opaque moral and poetic properties attaching to industrial power by depicting it in reference to the minutiae of Hindu religion so far as Southey understood it.
Appendices
Bibliography
- Adas, Michael. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989.
- “Assembly line.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 24 May 2018, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_line.
- Bacon, Francis. “On the Idols, the Scientific Study of Nature, and the Reformation of Education.” Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition, edited by Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003, pp. 25-37.
- Bergson, Henri. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Translated by R. Ashley Audra and Cloudsley Brereton, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977.
- Black, Max. “Metaphor.” Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor, edited by Mark Johnson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981.
- Bolton, Carol. Writing the Empire: Robert Southey and Romantic Colonialism. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007.
- Buchanan, Claudius. Christian Researches in Asia: With Notices on the Translation of the Scriptures into the Oriental Languages. New York: Richard Scott, 1812.
- Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Coleridge’s Writings Volume 5: On the Sublime. Edited by David Vallins, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
- Davidson, Donald. “What Metaphors Mean.” Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor, edited by Mark Johnson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981, pp. 200-220.
- Davis, Richard H. “Introduction: A Brief History of Religions in India.” Religions of India in Practice, edited by Donald S. Lopez Jr., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, pp. 3-52.
- Doniger, Wendy. The Hindus: An Alternative History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. (Hindus).
- Doniger, Wendy. “Introduction.” The Rig Veda: An Anthology, translated and edited by Wendy Doniger, New York: Penguin Books, 1981, pp. 11-21. (Rig Veda).
- Doniger, Wendy. The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. (Origins).
- Fletcher, Angus. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.
- Foster, John. Critical Essays Contributed to the Eclectic ReviewVol. I. Edited by J. E. Ryland, London: Henry G. Bohn, 1856.
- Franklin, Michael J. “‘Drafts upon Heaven’: Robert Southey, Tapas, and the ‘monstrous fables’ of Hinduism and Romanticism.” European Romantic Review, vol. 22, no. 2, 2011, pp. 257-276.
- Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
- Grabes, Herbert. Making Strange: Beauty, Sublimity, and the (Post)Modern ‘Third Aesthetic.’ Translated by Marc Colavincenzo, Tübingen & Basel: Francke, 2004.
- Gupta, Uma. Materialism in the Vedas. New Delhi: Classical Publishing Company, 1987.
- Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977.
- Henle, Paul. “Metaphor.” Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor, edited by Mark Johnson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981, pp. 83-104.
- Houtman, Dick, and Brigit Meyer. “Introduction: Material Religion—How Things Matter.” Religion and the Question of Materiality, edited by Dick Houtman and Brigit Meyer, New York: Fordham University Press, 2012, pp. 1-23.
- Inden, Robert. Imagining India. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990.
- Johnson, Mark. “Introduction: Metaphor in the Philosophical Tradition.” Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor, edited by Mark Johnson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981, pp. 3-47.
- Landes, David S. The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Europe from 1750 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
- Makdisi, Saree. Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
- Marcus, Steven. Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class. New York: Routledge, 2017.
- Matchett, Freda. “The Puranas.” The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, edited by Gavin Flood, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003, pp. 129-143.
- Modern, John Lardas. “Thinking about Melville, Religion and Things That Think.” Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between, edited by Jeremy Stolow, New York: Fordham University Press, 2012, pp. 183-212.
- Nye, David E. The American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.
- Olson, Carl. The Many Colors of Hinduism: A Thematic-Historical Introduction. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007.
- Oxford English Dictionary. www.oed.com
- Paley, Morton. The Apocalyptic Sublime. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.
- Radhikrishnan, Sarvepalli. Indian Philosophy. London: Allen and Unwin, 1951.
- Rajan, Balachandra. Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.
- Richards, I. A. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936.
- Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Translated by Denis Savage, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970. (Freud).
- Ricoeur, Paul. “The Metaphoric Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling.” Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor, edited by Mark Johnson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981, pp. 228-247. (“Metaphoric”).
- Ricoeur, Paul. The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language. Translated by Robert Czerny, Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, SJ., London: Routledge Classics, 2003. (Rule).
- Rudd, Andrew. Sympathy and India in British Literature, 1770-1830. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
- Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
- Savery, Thomas. The Miner’s Friend; or, An Engine to Raise the Water by Fire. London: S. Crouch, 1827.
- Scott, Walter. The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, Vol. VI. Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1838.
- Southey, Robert. The Curse of Kehama. London: James Ballantyne and Co., 1810. (Kehama).
- Southey, Robert. Letters from England: By Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella. Edited by Carol Bolton, London: Routledge, 2016.
- Southey, Robert. Sir Thomas More; Or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society. 2 vols., London: John Murray, 1829. (STM).
- Steigler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by George Collins, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
- Stolow, Jeremy. “Introduction: Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between.” Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between, edited by Jeremy Stolow, New York: Fordham University Press, 2012, pp. 1-22.
- Stroumsa, Guy G. A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
- Wallbank, Adrian J. Dialogue, Didacticism and the Genres of Dispute. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012.
- Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. (Marxism).
- Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. (Country).
- Witzel, Michael. “Vedas and Upanishads.” The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, edited by Gavin Flood, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003, pp. 68-101.
- Wordsworth, William. “And Is It Among Rude Untutored Dales.” The Collected Poems of William Wordsworth, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1994, p. 315.
- Wordsworth, William. The Excursion. Edited by Sally Bushell, James A. Butler, and Michael C. Jaye, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007. (Excursion).