This book explores Romanticism as a force that exerts an insistent but critically neglected
pressure on the postcolonial imagination. From the decolonizing poetics of the Caribbean to the
white writing of South Africa from the aesthetics of post-imperial disappointment to
postcolonial theory itself it develops an account of the textual and philosophical
interpenetration of postcolonial aesthetics with Romantic ideas about sense history and
world.What emerges is a reading of Romantic postcolonial co-involvement that moves beyond
well-worn models of intercanonical antagonism and the historicizing biases of conventional
literary history. Caught somewhere between the effects of reanimation and estrangement
Romanticism appears here not as a stable textual repository prior to the postcolonial but as
echo spectre self-interruption or vital force that can yet only emerge in the guise of the
afterlife its agency mediated - but never exhausted - by postcolonial writing.
