Author Description

This representative collection, the first of its kind, presents the majority of Derozio's poems with notes, and all available correspondence and journalism along with a detailed Introduction and critical comments. Apart from the two volumes of poetry that Derozio published in his lifetime, which have never been widely disseminated in their entirety, this edition brings together a number of new poems, essays, thoughts, and letters written to newspapers published both in his lifetime and posthumously. As a result, a fresh new picture emerges of a young man, energetic and inspired, who not only propelled a section of the Bengali elite into revolutionary reformism through his teaching, as is well known, but who also embodied, in his writing and philosophy, the birth of the modern. This book attempts to present a man and his moment in an entirely new and significant reading that places Derozio at the conceptual beginnings of an imagined nation that had begun to be conjured into existence through metaphor and image, rhetoric and philosophy, poetic practice, and political activism.