Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination

This book investigates how French Romanticism was shaped by and contributed to colonial discourses of race. It studies the ways in which metropolitan Romantic novels comprehend and construct colonized peoples, fashion French identity in the context of colonialism, and record the encounter between Europeans and non-Europeans. Prasad's study is one of the first to carry out a sustained and comprehensive analysis of the French Romantic novel¿s racial imagination that encompasses several sites of colonial contact: the Indian Ocean, North America, the Caribbean, West Africa, and France. Its archival research and interdisciplinary approach shed new light on both canonical and non-canonical texts.