Romanticism, Liberal Imperialism, and Technology in Early Bri... - 9783031607073

Romanticism, Liberal Imperialism, and Technology in Early British IndiaThe all-changing power of steam\nAuthor(s): Daniel E. White\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: Springer International Publishing AG, Switzerland\nImprint: Palgrave Macmillan\nISBN-13: 9783031607073, 978-3031607073\nSynopsis\nConsidering metropolitan and colonial cultural production as a unitary field of analysis, this book shows how tensions in the 1830s between utilitarian and Romantic perspectives on steam power marked meaningful divisions within the pervasive liberal imperialism of the period and generated divergent speculative fantasies, set in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, about the future of Indian nationalism. Poetry and fiction in Britain and Bengal engage with a Romantic strain of thought and sentiment according to which steam technology represents an anti-utilitarian humanization of nature. Within and against that frame and in uneven and different ways, writers in British India map a constellatio.