Dr. Joey S. Kim has long found herself drawn to British Romanticism, with its poems that evoke individuality and imagination and the natural world.
“But none of the poems really discussed people who looked like me,” observed Kim, who is Asian American. “When they did, the writers discussed it in a way that was essentializing or objectifying.
“Romanticism and the Poetics of Orientation” is the second published book by Dr. Joey S. Kim, an assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature.
“So I started to ask: Why is that? What are the trends here?”
Kim, an assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, began to explore those questions in her first semester as a graduate student at the Ohio State University in 2012. More than a decade and a doctoral dissertation later, she continues to explore them in “Romanticism and the Poetics of Orientation.”
Her second and latest book was published by Edinburgh University Press in September.
“Romanticism and the Poetics of Orientation” explores an influential period in literature and society. The British Romantic period spanned the late 1700s to the early 1800s, and corresponded with an explosion of interest or in the East or “Orient,” shaping what scholars call Orientalism.
Orientalism is the presentation of the East from the perspective of the West, generally in an essentializing or patronizing manner.
The British Empire’s rise in India began to color the worldview of writers who had previously found inspiration in ancient Greece and Rome. They began to explore new settings, themes and imagery in works like Lord Byron’s “Eastern Tales” and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Revolt of Islam.”
Other Orientalist writers whose work is analyzed in the book include William Jones, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Felicia Hemans, William Blake and Phillis Wheatley.
“Romanticism and the Poetics of Orientation” explores an influential period in literature and society.
In addition to Romanticism and Orientalism, Kim explores the concept of orientation.
“I look at the way in which these authors oriented themselves: culturally, geographically, aesthetically, racially and by gender,” she said. “They really changed the perspective of British Romanticism toward a more global audience, often at the cost of stereotyping people of the East.”
Kim’s research focus is global Anglophone literature with a focus on 18th- and 19th-century British literature and aesthetics. She teaches Asian American literature at UToledo, among other courses.
She’s been digging into the intersection of Romanticism and Orientalism for more than a decade, and first published part of this book’s research in her doctoral dissertation in 2018.
“As someone who is Asian American and grew up in predominantly white spaces, I turn to the rise of Orientalism in this period with a personal investment,” she said. “I just wanted to trace the origins to this important moment that became so celebrated in literature but at the cost of an entire continent. We see the repercussions of Orientalism around the world today, especially in the wake of COVID, and my future research looks at American Orientalism.”
“Romanticism and the Poetics of Orientation” is her first book for an academic audience.
She previously published a book of poetry, “Body Facts,” that was a finalist for the 81st annual Ohioana Book Awards in 2022.
