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The News from India: Emma Roberts and the Construction of Late Romanticism

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British Romanticism in Asia

Part of the book series: Asia-Pacific and Literature in English ((APLE))

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Abstract

In the late 1820s, Bengal and Britain were connected in a complex network of reprinting, citation, quotation, imitation, and revision. Poems circulated from Edinburgh to London to Kolkata and back again, as did writers themselves. A key figure in this circulation of verse (and also of travel writing and sociological journalism) was Emma Roberts (1794–1840), who accompanied her sister to India in 1828 and worked for three years in Bengal and North India. Roberts became the first woman newspaper editor in India and the first woman to support herself through her contributions to print culture. This paper examines the poetic networks in which Roberts participated and shows how she was both influenced by, and in turn shaped, poetic practices in both Kolkata and London.

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Gibson, M.E. (2019). The News from India: Emma Roberts and the Construction of Late Romanticism. In: Watson, A., Williams, L. (eds) British Romanticism in Asia. Asia-Pacific and Literature in English. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3001-8_2

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