After having discussed the tactics of epic writing in the 1790s and early 1800s, I return to 1789 in my sixth chapter in order to examine the subversive implications of Olaudah Equiano’s anticipation of the Romantic epic revival. Although his Interesting Narrative (1789) is not an epic, it borrows several aspects of the epic form in order to associate Equiano at once with both colonizers and the colonized. Mixing epic with autobiography, conversion narrative, and travel writing, the formal liminality of Equiano’s account amplifies his presentation of himself as a hybrid figure in terms of race and religion, allowing him to promote to his readers not merely Christianity, but a broader conception of identity that challenges the conceptual basis of slavery and imperialism. Drawing on the literary resources of his colonizers’ culture, Equiano ultimately uses his position as ‘other’ to promote in his Narrative a cosmopolitan Christian identity that transcends the categories of nation and race while revealing the flaws in the discourse of both evangelism and empire.

My proposals for decolonizing romanticism are threefold. First, and most obviously, transforming the romantic canon by including BAME writers such as Phyllis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, James Wedderburn, Mary Prince, Mirza Abu Talib Khan, Ramohun Roy, Henry Derozio. But decolonizing the curriculum must do more than just “add BAME writers and stir.” My second proposal would accordingly remap the established narrative of British romanticism in relation to the wider world of empire; both in relation to canonical figures like Blake and Austen, and to lesser-known writers like Southey and Hemans. My third proposal locates colonial travel accounts alongside poetry, drama, and the novel, given its role in establishing European “planetary consciousness.” Selecting writing by Mungo Park, James Bruce, Humboldt, Maria Graham, Belzoni, Reginald Heber, students can explore the contingency (and sometimes confusion) determining the “cultural entanglements” of European travelers on the colonial frontier. Travel texts restore a sense of the global interconnectivity of Britain’s and Scotland’s colonial and imperial history, allowing citizens of our multicultural society to recognize themselves in it.

As a consequence of the process of modernization and the new growing engagement of Latin American countries in cultural and material global exchanges, the period 1870–1930 marked some important transitions in the way travel was understood. It became increasingly a bodily and material practice, and even a form of consumption. This chapter follows some of these trends in order to show how different Latin American intellectuals of the period reflected upon their own writing about travel. Discussing works by Lucio V. Mansilla, Miguel Triana, Enrique Gómez Carrillo, and Mário de Andrade, it focuses on descriptions of the modes and rhythms of travel. Finally, it pays attention to the means of transportation: traveling by horse, on foot, by boat, by train, or by car turns out to connote a different experience as the relationships that the traveler establishes with the landscape vary significantly depending on the type of transportation used.

Sherrard Johnson’s chapter identifies some of the various aesthetic models and modes with which African Americans experimented in telling individual life stories during the New Negro movement, the Harlem Renaissance, and the interwar years. Sherrard Johnson argues that in migration and travel narratives and other autobiographical writings of the New Negro era, African American authors travel literally and figuratively; the power of these self-stories resides in an author’s interior reflection fused with external observations that both harness and resist the collective self.

The artifacts examined in this and the following chapter are “document” novels: starting in the late seventeenth century, novelists pretend their works were written by the protagonists themselves, chiefly in the form of memoirs or letters. Examining memoirs and other non-epistolary document novels, this chapter shows a clear process of isomorphism, as first-person documents come to resemble each other as they become more popular. The chapter also demonstrates that while the use of the first person was much more abundant in the seventeenth-century novel than typically acknowledged, that first person was not written but voiced (characters told their own stories to others). As such, there is no continuity between the dominant first-person technologies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.