Lord Macaulay (Thomas Babington Macaulay)

Spanning nearly two & a half centuries of English literature about India, Under Western Eyes traces the development of an imperial discourse that governed the English view of India well into the twentieth century. Narrating this history from its Reformation beginnings to its Victorian consolidation, Balachandra Rajan tracks this imperial presence through a wide range of literary & ideological sites. In so doing, he explores from a postcolonial vantage point collusions of gender, commerce, & empire-while revealing the tensions, self-deceptions, & conflicts at work within the English imperial design. Rajan begins with the Portuguese poet Camoes, whose poem celebrating Vasco da Gama's passage to India becomes, according to its eighteenth-century English translator, the epic of those who would possess India. He closely examines Milton's treatment of the Orient & Dryden's Aureng-Zebe, the first English literary work on an Indian subject. Texts by Shelley, Southey, Mill, & Macaulay, among others, come under careful scrutiny, as does Hegel's significant impact on English imperial discourse. Comparing the initial English representation of its actions in India (as a matter of commerce, not conquest) & its contemporaneous treatment of Ireland, Rajan exposes contradictions that shed new light on the English construction of a subaltern India. Giving postcolonial thought a historical dimension, Under Western Eyes also places literary history in new perspective through postcolonial readings. It will interest scholars of cultural history, particularly British imperial history, & those engaged with postcolonial, literary, subaltern, South Asian, & cultural studies.

Figures of Finance Capitalism brings into focus Victorian narratives by major middle-class writers in which the workings of finance capitalism are prominently featured, and reads this interest in finance capitalism in the context of middle-class misgivings about a class system still dominated by a patrician elite. This book illustrates the centrality of finance capitalism to the mid-Victorian middle-class social imagination by discussing a selection of major Victorian texts by Dickens, Gaskell, Thackeray and Macaulay. In so doing, it draws on several new perspectives on British history, as offered in the work of historians such as Tom Nairn, David Cannadine, and P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins. Articulating the basic coordinates for a new sociology of mid-Victorian literature, Borislav Knezevic views texts through the prism of the mid-Victorian literary field and its negotiations of the contemporary field of power.

This is a fascinating account of the influence of evangelicalism upon eminent Victorians. Recording family life was an important ritual in Victorian households, and out of this habit grew a new literary genre, the domestic biography, extolling individual piety and domestic virtue. Using documents from the archives of the Macaulay, Stephen, Wilberforce, and Thornton families, Dr Tolley analyzes the biographical tradition and its lasting effects upon "family values."

Talfourd's Copyright Bill was first presented in 1837, and the public and Parliamentary controversy it provoked is reflected in contemporary pamphlets, correspondence, and hundreds of petitions presented to Parliament, as well as in the changing aims of the Bill. This book explores and sets in context the making of the Copyright Act of 1842, using it to illuminate enduring issues and difficulties in the legal concept of intellectual property. A unique feature for legal historians is Appendix II in which Dr. Seville traces the progress of eleven versions of the Bill.