• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.5
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• pp.859-880
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• 2012

This paper aims at analyzing Robert Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer in relation to cultural colonialism of the British Romantic period and investigating the ways in which this text portrays the Other through its literary representation of the East. Especially, this paper attempts to show that the Oriental world constructed in Southey's text reveals the imperial subject's self-conscious awareness of its unstable relation with the unknown Other. For this purpose, this paper attends to the formal aspects of Thalaba the Destroyer, examining the process by which the reader's generic expectations about the "epic" undergo complex revisions and frustrations through reading this text. The epic elements contained in Thalaba the Detroyer include the battle between good and evil and the hero's moral epiphany arising from his struggle against malicious enemies. Yet, Thalaba the Destroyer constantly destabilizes the distinction between self and other by leading the reader to recognize the uncomfortable similarity between the poem's tyrannical figures and imperialistic monarchs in the Western civilization. Thus, when the hero enacts a revolution against despotism, the resistant power points not only to the imagined false kingdom within the text, but to the core of the real Empire that seeks to construct its own "garden" in the global scene. In addition, Southey's "panoramic" description of Oriental objects and stories in his footnotes lacks a framing perspective, erasing and de-stabilizing subject/object distinctions. In these footnotes, he exposes his profound attraction to the culture of "Other" and also conveys his aspiration to transforming Eastern myths and stories into profitable literary texts. Southey's attitude to the East in the footnotes appears to be partially grounded upon the interest of mercantile capitalists of the West, who need to discover potential commodities. Yet, simultaneously, he reveals a sense of moral hesitation about his own desire for the materiality of the East, along with deep anxiety arising from the fear of punishment.