Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Dedication
- Introduction: Reading from the Margins
- 1 Contesting the Jupien Effect: Annotation in the Eighteenth Century
- 2 The Author in the Margins: Annotation as Site of Conflict
- 3 Margins and Marginality: Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) and Sydney Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl (1806)
- 4 The Imperial Collection: Robert Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer: A Metrical Romance (1801)
- 5 The Margins of the Nation: Robert Burns's Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786) and Walter Scott's Waverley (1814)
- 6 Byron's Errantry: Lord Byron and John Cam Hobhouse's Annotation for Cantos I, II and IV of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1811–16)
- Conclusion: Romantic Marginality and Beyond
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
4 - The Imperial Collection: Robert Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer: A Metrical Romance (1801)
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Dedication
- Introduction: Reading from the Margins
- 1 Contesting the Jupien Effect: Annotation in the Eighteenth Century
- 2 The Author in the Margins: Annotation as Site of Conflict
- 3 Margins and Marginality: Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) and Sydney Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl (1806)
- 4 The Imperial Collection: Robert Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer: A Metrical Romance (1801)
- 5 The Margins of the Nation: Robert Burns's Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786) and Walter Scott's Waverley (1814)
- 6 Byron's Errantry: Lord Byron and John Cam Hobhouse's Annotation for Cantos I, II and IV of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1811–16)
- Conclusion: Romantic Marginality and Beyond
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Introduction: ‘A Sort of Miser-Like Love of Accumulation’
In a letter written on 11 July 1822, Robert Southey accuses himself of a ‘besetting sin – a sort of miser-like love of accumulation’. He continues:
[l]ike those persons who frequent sales, and fill their houses with useless purchases, because they may want them some time or other; so I am forever making collections and storing up materials which may not come into use until the Greek calends. And this I have been doing for five and twenty years! It is true that I draw daily upon my hoards, and should be poor without them; but in prudence I ought now to be working up those materials rather than adding to so much dead stock.
Here Southey recalls how he became a collector of miscellaneous information and exotica in the late 1790s, around the time that he began to write his sensational Oriental verse epic, Thalaba the Destroyer: A Metrical Romance (1801).
In this chapter, I use collecting as a lens for exploring Southey's extensive notes for Thalaba. Southey's verse relates the astonishing adventures of the Muslim hero Thalaba, as he travels through a series of exotic landscapes, overthrowing Eastern despots on his quest to find the Domdaniel caves and avenge the deaths of his family. In his notes for the poem, Southey assembles an array of strange and fascinating extracts from eighteenth-century travel narratives, ‘marvellous’ medieval and early modern travel tales, works of Orientalist scholarship and literary curios.
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- Romantic MarginalityNation and Empire on the Borders of the Page, pp. 73 - 100Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014