Strange gods: love and idolatry in the Victorian Novel

Abstract

South Africa and Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa (1916), which uses Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village to mobilize sympathy from the British public for the plight of his African compatriots, and Māori writer Rēweti Kōhere’s use of Byron and Thomas Babington Macaulay in his diplomatic texts from the 1910s to the 1940s. In the conclusion, Hessell turns to contemporary Pasifika women poets such as the Samoan writer Sia Figiel, who engage especially with William Wordsworth in their diplomatic works. In these instances, Romanticism has become a cultural and historical text rather than a contemporary context to be responded to, but these chapters offer a suggestive paradigm for considering Indigenous interpretive acts. Hessell successfully challenges notions of genre and periodization in this work, and more importantly expands the possibilities for how we write about and teach eighteenthand nineteenth-century literature. Its global focus makes unexpected connections across time and space. This is a great model for scholarship in this moment of crisis in the humanities. Perhaps, for those invested in traditional periodization of fields of knowledge, the way forward is this kind of expansive and generative approach that attends to both elements of the so-called canon and the voices marginalized and displaced by it. As Hessell suggests, Indigenous people quoted Romantic poetry because Europeans placed so much value on it, and in doing so they asked for “respect and oneness with the land, solidarity with the oppressed, and a fairer and more just world” (20). This sounds like a defense of a humanities worth saving.