What’s British about the British recluse? The political geography of early eighteenth-century fiction

This chapter examines the translocal relationships of two authors who were essential to the growing literary scene of Calcutta: the orientalist scholar and jurist William Jones, and the pseudonymous Anna Maria, whose collection of poems provoked celebrations from Calcutta reviewers about the vibrancy of British Bengal's literary culture. Jones was an orientalist, linguist, author, and jurist who arrived in Calcutta from England to take up a position on the Supreme Court of Bengal. The chapter argues the debate about the identity of Anna Maria continues, their translocalism results, from the interpenetration of seemingly antithetical spaces and extended temporalities. They pursue these translocal relationships to understand the significance of British colonialism in India and their role within it. Their Anglo-Indian writings theorize a translocal poetics that engages with urban and regional relays that scholars have typically associated with a more modern globalized world.