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65 books match the query 'Imperialism in literature' and 3 start with r

cover of Reforming Empire: Protestant Colonialism and Conscience in British Literature

Reforming Empire

Protestant Colonialism and Conscience in British Literature

Christopher Hodgkins

University of Missouri Press, 2002

“The strength of Empire,” wrote Ben Jonson, “is in religion.” In Reforming Empire, Christopher Hodgkins takes Jonson’s dictum as his point of departure, showing how for more than four centuries the Protestant imagination gave the British Empire its main paradigms for dominion and also, ironically, its chief languages of anti-imperial dissent. From Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene to Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King,” English literature about empire has turned with strange constancy to themes of worship and idolatry, atrocity and deliverance, slavery and service, conversion, prophecy, apostasy, and doom.

Focusing on the work of the Protestant imagination from the Renaissance origins of English overseas colonization through the modern end of England’s colonial enterprise, Hodgkins organizes his study around three kinds of religious binding—unification, subjugation, and self-restraint. He shows how early modern Protestants like Hakluyt and Spenser reformed the Arthurian chronicles and claimed to inherit Rome’s empire from the Caesars: how Ralegh and later Cromwell imagined a counterconquest of Spanish America, and how Milton’s Satan came to resemble Cortés; how Drake and the fictional Crusoe established their status as worthy colonial masters by refusing to be worshiped as gods; and how seventeenth-century preachers, poets, and colonists moved haltingly toward a racist metaphysics—as Virginia began by celebrating the mixed marriage of Pocahontas but soon imposed the draconian separation of the Color Line.

Yet Hodgkins reveals that Tudor-Stuart times also saw the revival of Augustinian anti-expansionism and the genesis of Protestant imperial guilt. From the start, British Protestant colonialism contained its own opposite: a religion of self-restraint. Though this conscience often was co-opted or conscripted to legitimize conquests and pacify the conquered, it frequently found memorable and even fierce literary expression in writers such as Shakespeare, Daniel, Herbert, Swift, Johnson, Burke, Blake, Austen, Browning, Tennyson, Conrad, Forster, and finally the anti-Protestant Waugh. Written in a lively and accessible style, Reforming Empire will be of interest to all scholars and students of English literature.

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cover of Romances of the White Man's Burden: Race, Empire, and the Plantation in American Literature, 1880-1936

Romances of the White Man's Burden

Race, Empire, and the Plantation in American Literature, 1880-1936

Jeremy Wells

Vanderbilt University Press, 2011

"Take up the white man's burden!" So wrote the English writer Rudyard Kipling in 1899, in a poem aimed at Americans at a time when colonial ambitions were particularly high. The poem proved especially popular among white southern men, who saw in its vision of America's imperial future an image that appeared to reflect and even redeem the South's plantation past.


Romances of the White Man's Burden takes on works in American literature in which the proverbial "old plantation" is made to seem not a relic but a harbinger, a sign that the South had arrived at a multiracial modernity and harmony before the rest of the United States. Focusing on writers such as Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, Henry W. Grady, Thomas Dixon, and William Faulkner, Jeremy Wells reveals their shared fixation on the figure of the white southern man as specially burdened by history. Each of these writers, in his own way, presented the plantation South as an emblem, not an aberration, of America.

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cover of Russia's Rome: Imperial Visions, Messianic Dreams, 1890–1940

Russia's Rome

Imperial Visions, Messianic Dreams, 1890–1940

Judith E. Kalb

University of Wisconsin Press, 2008

A wide-ranging study of empire, religious prophecy, and nationalism in literature, Russia’s Rome: Imperial Visions, Messianic Dreams, 1890–1940 provides the first examination of Russia’s self-identification with Rome during a period that encompassed the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and the rise of the Soviet state. Analyzing Rome-related texts by six writers—Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Valerii Briusov, Aleksandr Blok, Viacheslav Ivanov, Mikhail Kuzmin, and Mikhail Bulgakov—Judith E. Kalb argues that the myth of Russia as the “Third Rome” was resurrected to create a Rome-based discourse of Russian national identity that endured even as the empire of the tsars declined and fell and a new state replaced it.
            Russia generally finds itself beyond the purview of studies concerned with the ongoing potency of the classical world in modern society. Slavists, for their part, have only recently begun to note the influence of classical civilization not only during Russia’s neo-classical eighteenth century but also during its modernist period. With its interdisciplinary scope, Russia’s Rome fills a gap in both Russian studies and scholarship on the classical tradition, providing valuable material for scholars of Russian culture and history, classicists, and readers interested in the classical heritage.
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