Romanticism has always found varied and refreshing ways to find expression in the reverence of nature to leave a lasting legacy of quintessential literary modes of poetry and the novel. Although essentially drawn from Eurocentric perspectives and traditions, Romanticism has ultimately had an innocuous influence on postcolonial writing. As to whether that influence can be observed in a “writing back” of sorts or an adaptation/mimicry in general is the fundamental focus of this masterful book by Philip Dickinson. Romantic infusions in postcolonial writing may be obvious on the surface, but how do postcolonial theorists and writers either grapple with or disentangle themselves from such infusions? The book and its methodology also seem to offer an alternative approach to the weightier issues of endeavors being made at decolonizing the curriculum in many formerly colonized nations in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia.

Dickinson has organized the book into five enlightening chapters, which reflect the literary representation of the postcolonial world of the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa. The selection of authors, in my view, is also quite fascinating, taking into consideration an author like Naipaul, who perchance straddles the three geolocations of Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean as represented in the book. It therefore stands to reason that the aesthetic descriptions that are symptomatic of romanticism will ultimately be blurred within the context of colonial history and postcolonial certainty. This capability of most postcolonial writing to liminally disengage and reengage with canonical aesthetics is succinctly captured in the Derek Walcott quotation from his poem “The Spoiler’s Return,”Footnote ¹ which is among a series of quotations that precede Chapter 1 as an epigraph: “I decompose, but I composing still.”

Right from the very first chapter where we are introduced to the “Daffodil Syndrome,” we get an understanding about the extent of aesthetic quandary and “intercanonical antagonism” that romanticism and postcolonialism find themselves ensconced in. Dickinson’s reference to Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid foregrounds the whole argument of the book, and we are made to appreciate the aesthetic violence that has been wreaked on the British colonial education system over a period, while emphasizing the issues or discussions about canonicity that has always engulfed postcolonial criticism. At the same time, we are also made to recognize the fact that romantic ideals operate as a major resource for “postcolonial texts and subjectivities” (13). In addition, clarity is brought on to the context of romanticism as a phenomenon that does not seek to historicize romantic writing within a specific period but to assert the “hybridity” that characterizes postcolonial texts. Again, Dickinson highlights the structure of the book in this first chapter by signaling what he refers to as “countervoice” (15): which portrays how postcolonial texts (especially the ones he selects for the book) have utilized romantic aesthetics in ways that connote what he calls “aesthetic exhaustion.” In choosing or selecting these key countervoices to the principal texts in his book, Dickinson offers us alternative perspectives in deconstructing the aesthetics of romanticism by juxtapositioning Walcott and Lamming, Naipaul and Desai, Watson and Coetzee. Although, unfortunately, we do not find a countervoice for Spivak, Dickinson, however, skillfully identifies and provides a pseudo-countervoice or what he terms countervocalization within the discussions on the works of Spivak. I believe as an introductory chapter, this first chapter, indeed, is very successful at giving readers a foretaste of the analysis that will ensue in the subsequent chapters.

The book progresses through to the next chapter (Chapter 2), which throws a spotlight on Walcott’s influences and Lamming as a countervoice. We realize from this chapter that Dickinson homes in on a number of Walcott’s poems to make his argument. It is such a reader’s and critic’s gift to find an awe-inspiring analysis of Derek Walcott’s poems in this book. Poems such as “Another Life,” “The Gulf,” “Dream Variants,” “Prelude,” and “The Sea Shell” are enmeshed in analyses that reference works from Wordsworth. Dickinson suggests in this chapter that Walcott’s poetry, in comparison to that of Wordsworth, can be said to communicate “a sense of history and a sense of the world” (60), in which assertion “the world” appears to take more of a center stage than “history.”

After engaging mainly with the works of Derek Walcott and George Lamming as countervoice, Dickinson proceeds to focus on the Enigma of Arrival by V. S. Naipaul as a literary work within the ambit of romanticism. Staging this work as transcending time and space in terms of postcolonial history and landscape aesthetics, Dickinson constructs his analysis under a concept he represents as “Dis-enclosure” in the third chapter of Romanticism and Aesthetic Life in Postcolonial Writing. To Dickinson, Naipaul’s adaptation of the romantic ideal in Enigma of Arrival is perhaps meant to position him as a postcolonial writer with a more hospitable outlook toward the English canon and also possibly marks an attempt to have himself canonized within that tradition. Significantly, Dickinson is raising arguments that I believe critics of postcolonial literature, as well as romanticists alike, may be mulling over for some time. The analysis on Naipaul’s work is so assiduous that it warrants a rereading of Naipaul’s works. Some of the discussions tackle the picturesque, and uncanny landscapes, as well as the adaptation of the lyric form. Another point of interest in this chapter is the comparison that Dickinson draws between Anita Desai’s Fire on The Mountain and Enigma of Arrival, staging the former as countervoice to the latter. Here, he juxtaposes these two novels to represent the “two different visions of relationship between literary aesthetics and postcolonial history” (107–08). The juxtaposition of the two novels will obviously set every reader scrambling to reread these texts over and over again, as I have already stated. Perhaps, this is the greatest strength of this book: the way in which Dickinson juxtaposes divergent perspectives about canonized aesthetics with postcolonial lenses.

Despite not being very conversant with the poetry of Stephen Watson, I found the analysis of Coetzee’s work as Watson’s countervoice in Chapter 4 quite illuminating. The exposition on Coetzee’s novel Disgrace in juxtaposition with Watson’s collection of poems in The Other City, in my view, places Dickinson’s book within the best ten critical works on the evolution of postcolonial writing and its influences on critical discourse. In this chapter, Dickinson attempts to situate Watson’s poetry on the same scale as Wordsworth’s with regard to the realization of “imaginative mediation in approaching Romantic desire” (141–42). He also emphasizes the fact that Watson’s approach to romanticism, although Wordsworthian, may, perhaps, qualify to be on a higher scale than Wordsworth’s works. Dickinson also suggests clearly that the romantic aesthetics may have underpinned white ideologies of South African spaces or landscapes that inadvertently may have bolstered the aesthetic regime of apartheid South Africa. Within the book, we consistently find, in almost all the chapters, an interconnected form of discussion or analysis that embraces most of the selected texts. This makes it quite easy for readers to be reminded of the pertinent discussions in previous chapters as counterpoint to any particular chapter’s exposition.

Having had to come to terms with the intricate load of romantic theories and its pragmatisms within the postcolonial limelight from chapters 1 to 4, it comes as no surprise that Dickinson will engage with the theoretical works of Gayatri C. Spivak in Chapter 5 because theory always finds itself as inextricably linked to literary expression. Dickinson seeks to engage both the epistemological and aesthetic perspectives derived from reading Spivak, while obviously connecting the preceding literary counterparts in earlier chapters with issues regarding landscape description within romantic ideals. From the ensuing discussions, Dickinson asserts that the “Romantic phenomenology of aesthetic life as well as the Postcolonial epistemology of the subaltern dovetail into each other” (168). Readers will also find that this section of the book details in analysis of Spivak’s readings of Hegel and Paul de Man. Finally, we realize from the deliberations on Spivak’s theoretical readings that, perhaps, romanticism infuses its aesthetic qualities into postcolonial writing through its narratological and compositional structures.

On the whole, I think the sole shortcoming of Dickinson’s Romanticism and Aesthetic Life in Postcolonial Writing lies in the fact that the book is steeped in so much theory that, perhaps, it may not be a suitable reference material for my final year undergraduate class, which focuses on romantic influences in African literature. On the contrary, though, the book’s depth in theory does not detract from the quality of its central argument, which is clearly well researched and well written. It will, therefore, be an excellent resource text for many graduate-level courses on postcolonial literature. Besides, as I stressed earlier, this is a book that will get you to reread and reexamine most texts within the postcolonial literary canon, and also provide a template for creating a decolonized curriculum within postcolonial literary discourse and scholarship.