Positioning The Missionary: Poetic Circles and the Development of Colonial Romance

Abstract

In this chapter, I investigate the pioneering of a new Romantic genre that, in the hands of Byron and Scott, would become one of the most popular of the era. The colonial romance—the verse narrative that told a story of love and hate between colonizer and colonized in a country undergoing imperial conquest—was a cousin of the Oriental tales that I examined in the second chapter, but was much more clearly related to contemporary power struggles across the globe. Scott’s Vision of Don Roderick (1811), for example, used the eighth-century conflict for control of Spain to allegorize the Peninsular War between Napoleonic France and the allied forces of the Spanish resistance and of Britain. Byron’s The Giaour (1813) set a love story between a Christian and a Muslim in the Greek islands, long the possession of Venice and coveted by the Turks and currently the object of both French and Russian/Ottoman ambition. “The Island” (1823), meanwhile, portrayed the recently discovered Tahiti, setting the love of an island girl and a mutineer from the Bounty against the colonial order imposed by the British navy.