Results by title

65 books match the query 'Imperialism in literature' and 6 start with d

cover of DECIPHERING RACE: WHITE ANXIETY, RACIAL CONFLICT, & THE TURN TO FICTION IN MID-VICTORIAN ENGLISH PROSE

DECIPHERING RACE

WHITE ANXIETY, RACIAL CONFLICT, & THE TURN TO FICTION IN MID-VICTORIAN ENGLISH PROSE

Laura Callanan

The Ohio State University Press, 2005

Deciphering Race engages with the complex and contested world of Victorian racial discourse. In the five central texts under consideration in this study—Harriet Martineau’s The Hour and the Man, Robert Knox’s The Races of Men, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins’s “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners,” the transcript of the inquiry into the Governor Eyre Controversy, and James Grant’s First Love and Last Love—a white English author or character turns to the aesthetic in order to assuage a sense of anxiety produced by a confrontation with racial otherness. White characters or narrators confront the limitations of preconceived ideologies or the interlacing of oppressions, and subsequently falter.

In this manner these narratives confront the complexity, indeterminacy, and irrationality of both racial difference and the systems put in place to understand that difference. Deciphering Race unpacks this narrative turn to the aesthetic in writings by white English individuals and thus reveals the instability at the heart of cultural understanding of race and racial tropes at mid-century. This series of readings will help to see how figurative structures, while providing a bridge between different cultures and epistemologies, also reinforce a distance that keeps groups separate. Only by disentangling these structures, by addressing and unpacking our assumptions and narratives about those different from ourselves, and by understanding our deep cultural anxiety and investment in these ways of talking about one another, can we begin to create the conditions for productive, local understanding between different cultures, races, and communities.
[more]
cover of DETECTING THE NATION: FICTIONS OF DETECTION AND THE IMPERIAL VENTURE

DETECTING THE NATION

FICTIONS OF DETECTION AND THE IMPERIAL VENTURE

Caroline Reitz

The Ohio State University Press, 2004

In Detecting the Nation, Reitz argues that detective fiction was essential both to public acceptance of the newly organized police force in early Victorian Britain and to acclimating the population to the larger venture of the British Empire. In doing so, Reitz challenges literary-historical assumptions that detective fiction is a minor domestic genre that reinforces a distinction between metropolitan center and imperial periphery. Rather, Reitz argues, nineteenth-century detective fiction helped transform the concept of an island kingdom to that of a sprawling empire; detective fiction placed imperialism at the center of English identity by recasting what had been the suspiciously un-English figure of the turn-of-the-century detective as the very embodiment of both English principles and imperial authority. She supports this claim through reading such masters of the genre as Godwin, Dickens, Collins, and Doyle in relation to narratives of crime and empire such as James Mill's History of British India, narratives about Thuggee, and selected writings of Kipling and Buchan. Detective fiction and writings more specifically related to the imperial project, such as political tracts and adventure stories, were inextricably interrelated during this time.
[more]
cover of Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony

Decolonizing Memory

Algeria and the Politics of Testimony

Jill Jarvis

Duke University Press, 2021

The magnitude of the legal violence exercised by the French to colonize and occupy Algeria (1830–1962) is such that only aesthetic works have been able to register its enduring effects. In Decolonizing Memory Jill Jarvis examines the power of literature to provide what demographic data, historical facts, and legal trials have not in terms of attesting to and accounting for this destruction. Taking up the unfinished work of decolonization since 1962, Algerian writers have played a crucial role in forging historical memory and nurturing political resistance—their work helps to make possible what state violence has rendered almost unthinkable. Drawing together readings of multilingual texts by Yamina Mechakra, Waciny Laredj, Zahia Rahmani, Fadhma Aïth Mansour Amrouche, Assia Djebar, and Samira Negrouche alongside theoretical, juridical, visual, and activist texts from both Algeria’s national liberation war (1954–1962) and war on civilians (1988–1999), this book challenges temporal and geographical frameworks that have implicitly organized studies of cultural memory around Euro-American reference points. Jarvis shows how this literature rewrites history, disputes state authority to arbitrate justice, and cultivates a multilingual archive for imagining decolonized futures.
[more]
cover of Domestications: American Empire, Literary Culture, and the Postcolonial Lens

Domestications

American Empire, Literary Culture, and the Postcolonial Lens

Hosam Aboul-Ela

Northwestern University Press, 2018

Domestications traces a genealogy of American global engagement with the Global South since World War II. Hosam Aboul-Ela reads American writers contrapuntally against intellectuals from the Global South in their common—yet ideologically divergent—concerns with hegemony, world domination, and uneven development. Using Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism as a model, Aboul-Ela explores the nature of U.S. imperialism’s relationship to literary culture through an exploration of five key terms from the postcolonial bibliography: novel, idea, perspective, gender, and space.

Within this framework the book examines juxtapositions including that of Paul Bowles’s Morocco with North African intellectuals’ critique of Orientalism, the global treatment of Vietnamese liberation movements with the American narrative of personal trauma in the novels of Tim O’Brien and Hollywood film, and the war on terror’s philosophical idealism with Korean and post-Arab nationalist materialist archival fiction.

Domestications departs from other recent studies of world literature in its emphases not only on U.S. imperialism but also on intellectuals working in the Global South and writing in languages other than English and French. Although rooted in comparative literature, its readings address issues of key concern to scholars in American studies, postcolonial studies, literary theory, and Middle Eastern studies.

[more]
cover of Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration in the Victorian Novel

Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration in the Victorian Novel

Diana C. Archibald

University of Missouri Press, 2002

During the nineteenth century, as millions of British citizens left for the New Worlds, hearth and home were physically moved from the heart of the empire to its very outskirts. In Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration in the Victorian Novel, Diana Archibald explores how such demographic shifts affected the ways in which Victorians both promoted and undermined the ideal of the domestic woman. Drawing upon works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Samuel Butler, Charles Dickens, Charles Reade, and William Makepeace Thackeray, the author shows how the ideals of womanhood and home promoted by domestic ideology in many ways conflict with the argument in favor of immigration to imperial destinations. 
According to Coventry Patmore and John Ruskin, and some of their contemporaries, woman’s natural domain is the home, and a woman’s fulfillment lies at the hearthside. But would any hearth do as long as it was hallowed by the presence of a domestic goddess, or was this Victorian definition of home more discriminating? Although the ideal of the domestic woman was certainly affected by these mass movements, in many texts the definition of her becomes narrow and unattainable, for she must not only be an “angel,” but she must also be English and remain at home.
A rather predictable pattern emerges in almost every Victorian novel that encounters the New Worlds: if an English hero is destined for a happy ending, he either marries an English angel-wife and brings her with him to the New World or, more often, abandons thoughts of settling abroad and returns to England to marry and establish a home. This pattern seems to support the supposedly complementary ideologies of domesticity and imperialism. England, according to imperialist dogma, was the righteous center of a powerful empire whose mission was to “civilize” the rest of the world. The purpose of the domestic “angel” was to provide the moral center of a sacred space, and what is more sacred to such a scheme than English soil? A true “angel” should be English. Despite the mass migrations of the nineteenth century, home remains fundamentally English.
 The literary texts, however, reveal much ambivalence toward this domestic ideal. Often the colonial and native women were seen as foils for the English “angels” because they were much more interesting and attractive. At times, domestic and imperialist ideologies themselves conflicted. Female emigrants were desperately needed in the colonies; thus, a woman’s imperial duty was to leave England. Yet her womanly duty
told her to remain an untainted idol beside an English hearthside. The domestic ideal, then, because of its firm alliance with nationalism, seems to have been more in conflict with imperialistic ideology than heretofore supposed.
[more]
cover of Dreaming Revolution: Transgression in the Development of American Romance

Dreaming Revolution

Transgression in the Development of American Romance

Scott Bradfield

University of Iowa Press, 1993

Dreaming Revolution usefully employs current critical theory to address how the European novel of class revolt was transformed into the American novel of imperial expansion. Bradfield shows that early American romantic fiction—including works by William Godwin, Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe—can and should be considered as part of a genre too often limited to the nineteenth-century European novel. In a spirited discussion of the works from these four authors, Bradfield argues that Americans take the class dynamics of the European psychological novel and apply them to the American landscape, reimagining psychological spaces as geographical ones.

[more]