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When the Scottish poet Thomas Pringle emigrated to the Cape Colony in 1820 he voyaged also into a new creative life and an art responsive to his colonial home, “sterner verse” for “darker scenes”. Accompanying him to the Cape, the sonnet became his most consistent choice for capturing his experiences and convictions, his personal crises and the greater trauma of colonial appropriation and racial oppression. In this study his unique contribution to the Romantic-era sonnet is for the first time given its full due, through readings that are as attentive to form and formal agency as to the cultural, social and historical conditions in which they are enmeshed. Moving beyond colonial theory to consider issues of literary migration, this illuminating work shows how Pringle effectively opened up a radical conversation between the habitual modes of perception and response of British Romanticism and his new, southern world.
Price: $145.00
Pages: 318
Publisher: Brill
Imprint: Brill
Series: SCROLL: Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature
Publication Date:
17 July 2023
ISBN: 9789004533790
Format: Hardcover
"Overall, Lenahan situates Pringle in the cosy narrative of 'Cape liberalism' that portrays the British settlers at the Cape as champions of free speech, literary taste formation and Indigenous rights. [...] The careful close readings of the thirty-three sonnets that Pringle has left to posterity make a compelling argument for Pringle's inclusion within the canons of Scottish and British Romanticism." - Lars Atkin, University of Kent, England in Scottish Literary Review, Volume 16, Number 2 Autumn/Winter 2024, pp.194-198.
Patrick Lenahan is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Pretoria. He is a co-editor of Voices of this Land: An Anthology of South African Poetry in English.