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Chapter 7 - ‘It Is Otherwise in Asia’

‘Character’ and Improvement in Picaresque Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 July 2019

James Watt
Affiliation:
University of York
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Summary

In the preface to Hellas (1822), Percy Shelley cited Thomas Hope’s ‘admirable novel’ Anastasius (1819), subtitled ‘Memoirs of a Greek’, as a ‘faithful picture’ of corrupted Greek manners before the recent return of ‘the flower of [Greek] youth, … from the universities of Italy, Germany, and France, … communicated to their fellow-citizens the latest results of that moral perfection of which their ancestors were the original source’. This chapter begins by examining Hope’s Anastasius and its protagonist’s complex relation to his Greek cultural heritage. The novel displays obvious debts to Byron and Byronism, and as the quotation just cited demonstrates it indirectly at least addresses the question which both Byron and Shelley were to raise about whether modern Greeks might already be too debased to throw off the Ottoman yoke. Rather than discuss Hope’s intervention in debates about Greek independence, however, I want instead here to consider some of the other implications of Shelley’s claim that the novel offered a ‘faithful picture’ of manners. Anastasius was regarded by some as an irredeemably Orientalized figure, and situated in a broader literary-historical context, Hope’s work can be seen as the prototype of a mode of fictionalized autobiography featuring native informants, written by men with experience of diplomacy and/or imperial administration such as James Morier, James Bailie Fraser, and William Browne Hockley.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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