Sensitive Negotiations: Indigenous Diplomacy and British Romantic Poetry

Sensitive Negotiations: Indigenous Diplomacy and British Romantic Poetry
ISBN-10
143848478X
ISBN-13
9781438484785
Category
Literary Criticism
Pages
312
Language
English
Published
2021-08-01
Publisher
State University of New York Press
Author
Nikki Hessell

Description

Examines how Indigenous figures used British Romantic poetry in their interactions with settler governments and publics. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indigenous peoples in North America and the Pacific engaged with the latest and most fashionable British Romantic poetry as part of transcontinental and transoceanic cross-cultural negotiations about sovereignty, treaty rights, and land claims. In Sensitive Negotiations, Nikki Hessell uses examples from North America, Africa, and the Pacific to show how these Indigenous figures quoted lines from famous poets like Lord Byron and Felicia Hemans to build sympathy and community with their audience. Hessell makes new connections by setting aside European-derived genre barriers to bring literary studies to bear on the study of diplomacy and scholarship from diplomatic history and Indigenous studies to bear on literary criticism. By connecting British Romantic poetry with Indigenous diplomatic texts, artefacts, and rituals, Hessell reimagines poetry as diplomatic and diplomacy as poetic. Nikki Hessell is Associate Professor of English at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She is the author of Literary Authors, Parliamentary Reporters: Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Dickens and Romantic Literature and the Colonised World: Lessons from Indigenous Translations.

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