Publication of Jim Watt's new book

Posted on 16 September 2019

CECS & English academic's book, 'British Orientalisms, 1759–1835', now published by Cambridge University Press.

British Orientalisms, 1759–1835 looks at how Britons understood their relationship with the East in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Jim Watt's new study remaps the literary history of British Orientalisms between 1759, the 'year of victories' in the Seven Years' War, and 1835, when T. B. Macaulay published his polemical 'Minute on Indian Education'. It explores the impact of the war on Britons' cultural horizons, and the different and shifting ways in which Britons conceived of themselves and their nation as 'open' to the East across this period.

Considering the emergence of new forms and styles of writing in the context of an age of empire and revolution, Watt examines how the familiar 'Eastern' fictions of the past were adapted, reworked, and reacted against. In doing so he illuminates the larger cultural conflict which animated a nation debating with itself about its place in the world and relation to its others.

Jim Watt is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at Related Literature at York and a member of the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies.