ISBN 0-7083-1294-2
pp xxx415 1995 hardback
ISBN 0-7083-1294-2
Sir William Jones (1746-94), philologist, polymath, polyglot, acknowledged legislator and poet, was the greatest Orientalist of his generation. His intellect spanned encyclopaedic Enlightenment investigation and radical Romantic speculation. This fully annotated critical edition will enable students and scholars to access Jones's key poetical and prose works with a knowledge of their place in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and European culture, and an informed understanding of their roots in Asian culture.
'As a critical edition, Franklin's anthology is superb. He has made judicious use of unpublished manuscripts that show how the texts evolved. Best of all, the anthology is thoroughly annotated.'(Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History)
‘There was a time when Sir William Jones was known only as a translator. However, he is now fast becoming appreciated as a pre-romantic writer of considerable quality, and anyone wishing to sample his work at its best could not do better than to turn to Michael J. Franklin’s edition of Jones’s Selected Poetical and Prose Works . . . Each poem is preceded by a headnote informing the reader of its significance, occasion and bibliographical history, and the footnotes, which appear on the same page as the text to which they refer, are good. They are full of useful pieces of information, specific comments on the poetry, scholarly observations and the like . . . this selection establishes Jones’s importance to the romantic writers beyond doubt . . . ’ (Year’s Work in English Studies)
'[The author] has written an informative and lucid account of Jones's career, and created a fine anthology, scrupulously edited, of his writings . . . ' (Welsh History Review)
'It is a stimulating collection not easily available elsewhere, and will help greatly in reassessing the real achievement of Jones and other orientalists, who face powerful critics in a very contemporary debate.' (Asian Affairs)
The volume is arranged in four main sections: Original Poems; Oriental Translations; Essays; and Political Writings. The texts within each section are arranged in chronological order of composition, and each has a headnote on its particular occasion and general significance allowing the reader to appreciate Jones's poetic, intellectual, and political development, his contribution to bourgeois radicalism in Britain, Oriental renaissance in Europe, and cultural revolution in Bengal.
The poems range from extempore lyric pieces to profound philosophical Pindaric odes, from occasional and political pieces to Oriental verse tales. Together with his authoritative essays and translations they fired the imagination and weighted the footnotes of the Romantics. Jones's (1789) translations of the atmospheric -akuntal- and the divinely erotic G-tagovinda revealed his sympathetic and syncretic response to Hinduism, delighting Goethe and Schiller, and radically adjusting European conceptions of the subcontinent.
The political section includes his radical `Speech on the Nomination of Candidates' (`as bold as the boldest of Mr Wilkes's'), omitted from his collected works and unpublished since 1782. His Principles of Government, written in Benjamin Franklin's house, proved a landmark in the history of parliamentary reform. Jones has two major claims on critical attention now: the literary-historical significance for Romantic Orientalism of his representations of Asia; and his central importance as author and authorizer of colonial discourse and practice within the specific climate of current postcolonial debate. This edition will play an important role in the critical reassessment of Sir William Jones.
Michael Franklin is currently Head of English at St John the Baptist Comprehensive, Aberdare. While on secondment he has been a part-time English lecturer at University of Wales Cardiff. He is author of a biography in the Writers of Wales series, Sir William Jones (University of Wales Press, 1995), and of articles on medieval love-lyric, Oriental Gothic, and colonial rhetoric.
The portrait on the front cover is of Sir William Jones, aged forty-seven, by Arthur William Devis (1763-1822), reproduced by permission of the British Library (Oriental and India Office Collections).