This book investigates how French Romanticism was shaped by and contributed to colonial discourses of race. It studies the ways in which metropolitan Romantic novels-that is, novels by French authors such as Victor Hugo, George Sand, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Fran ois Ren de Chateaubriand, Claire de Duras, and Prosper M rim e-comprehend and construct colonized peoples, fashion French identity in the context of colonialism, and record the encounter...