Synopses & Reviews
Review
Competing notions of national character, both English and Indian, populate Mary Ellis Gibsons new anthology, Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 17801913
which traces the contours of English language poetry across the subcontinent over the course of the long nineteenth century.
Gibson includes many poems sure to provoke fascinating discussion.”
Victorian Poetry
Review
Both of Gibsons books (Indian Angles and Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India) stand as shining examples of the strategic comparativist work needed to assess the full array of literary voices in/on India during the long nineteenth century.”
English Literature in Transition, 18801920
Review
The contradictions and connections Gibson reads in the writings of British, Indian, and mixed-race poets from Sir William Jones to Rabindranath Tagore, are on full display in her companion piece anthology of Anglophone poetry, which will introduce many readers to the exciting work of over thirty poets, including those long lost in the liminal space between the British canon and the Indian nationalist canon: lower-class British men and women in India, and mixed-race writers.”
Studies in English Literature, 15001900
Synopsis
Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913: A Critical Anthology makes accessible for the first time the entire range of poems written in English on the subcontinent from their beginnings in 1780 to the watershed moment in 1913 when Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Mary Ellis Gibson establishes accurate texts for such well-known poets as Toru Dutt and the early Indian English poet Kasiprasad Ghose. With accurate and reliable texts, detailed notes on vocabulary, historical and cultural references, and biographical introductions to more than thirty poets, this collection will significantly reshape the understanding of English language literary culture in India.
About the Author
Mary Ellis Gibson is Class of 1952 Distinguished Professor of English, University of North Carolina Greensboro. Her books include History and the Prism of Art: Brownings Poetic Experiments and Epic Reinvented: Ezra Pound and the Victorians. She has also edited several other anthologies, including New Stories by Southern Women, Homeplaces: Stories of the South by Women Writers, and Critical Essays on Robert Browning.