Imperialism in Literature

At the heart of coloniality and postcoloniality is the idea of empire. This book examines various theories of empire, and how they create networks of discourse in contemporary postcolonial settings. In exploring the idea of empire, the contributors consider such constructions as nation and modernity, identity politics, the status and role of exiles, and border intellectuals. Postcolonial texts considered include literature and films.

This volume presents a powerful selection of reprinted and new essays by one of the most important critics in postcolonial studies. This text offers an outline of the historical and personal contexts from which Parrys' work has emerged, a series of essays that vigorously challenge colonial discourse theory and postcolonialism as we have known them and details a series of readings of well-known texts by authors including Kipling, Conrad, Wells and Forster. What then is the future of postcolonial theory? Parry concludes with the compelling argument that theoretical work must strive to join remembrance of the material past with a critique of the contemporary condition, remaining unreconciled to the past and unconsoled by the present.

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.

Hodgkins organizes his study around three kinds of religious binding -- unification, subjugation, and self-restraint. He details 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 Cortes; 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 andpacify 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

John Carlos Rowe, considered one of the most eminent and progressive critics of American literature, has in recent years become instrumental in shaping the path of American studies. His latest book examines literary responses to U.S. imperialism from the late eighteenth century to the 1940s. Interpreting texts by Charles Brockden Brown, Poe, Melville, John Rollin Ridge, Twain, Henry Adams, Stephen Crane, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Neihardt, Nick Black Elk, and Zora Neale Hurston, Rowe argues that U.S. literature has a long tradition of responding critically or contributing to our imperialist ventures. Following in the critical footsteps of Richard Slotkin and Edward Said, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism is particularly innovative in taking account of the public and cultural response to imperialism. In this sense it could not be more relevant to what is happening in the scholarship, and should be vital reading for scholars and students of American literature and culture.

While Western literature has long reflected the techniques of power that privileged the colonial masters and their point of view, Russian fictional and nonfictional texts have escaped such scrutiny because Russia is not generally considered a colonial power. In arguing that Russia's long history of territorial expansion is a form of colonization, this book uses postcolonial theory to examine Russian literature and the power structures reflected in it. Among the authors discussed are Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn.

During the nineteenth century, as hundreds of thousands of British citizens left England 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 emigration to imperial destinations.

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.

The literary texts, however, reveal much ambivalence toward this domestic ideal. 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, seems to have been more in conflict with imperialistic ideology than heretofore supposed.

In this exciting re-reading of the classic work of Haggard and Kipling, Gail Ching-Liang Low examines the representational dynamics of colonizer versus colonized. Exploring the interface between the native 'other' as a reflection and as a point of address, the author asserts that this 'other' is a mirror reflecting the image of the colonizer - a 'cultural cross-dressing'. Employing psychoanalysis, anthropology and postcolonial theory, Low analyzes the way in which fantasy and fabulation are caught up in networks of desire and power. White Skins/Black Masks is a fascinating entry into the current debate of post-colonial theory.

""American Sensations is an erudite and sweeping cultural history of the sensationalist literatures and mass cultures of the American 1848. It is the finest book yet written on the U.S.-Mexican War, and how it was central to the making and unmaking of U.S. mass culture, class, and racial formation."--Jose David Saldivar, author of "Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies

"A major work that will challenge current paradigms of nineteenth-century literature and culture. "American Sensations brilliantly succeeds in remapping the volatile and shifting terrain of both national identity and literary history in the mid-nineteenth century."--Amy Kaplan, co-editor of "Cultures of United States Imperialism

Empire's Children looks at works at by Rudyard Kipling, Frances Hodgson Burnett, E. Nesbit, Hugh Lofting, A.A. Milne, and Arthur Ransome for the ways these writers consciously and unconsciously used the metaphors of empire in their writing for children.

Colonialism left an indelible mark on writers from the Caribbean. Many of the midcentury male writers, on the eve of independence, looked to England for their models. The current generation of authors, many of whom are women, have increasingly looked-& relocated-to the United States. Incorporating postcolonial theory, West Indian literature, feminist theory, & African American literary criticism, Making Men carves out a particular relationship between the Caribbean canon-as represented by C. L. R. James & V. S. Naipaul, among others-& contemporary Caribbean women writers such as Jean Rhys, & Jamaica Kincaid, Paule Marshall, & Michelle Cliff, who now live in the United States. Discussing the canonical Caribbean narrative as it reflects national identity under the domination of English cultural authority, Belinda Edmondson focuses particularly on the pervasive influence of Victorian sensibilities in the structuring of twentieth-century national identity. She shows that issues of race & English constructions of masculinity not only are central to West Indian identity but also connect Caribbean authorship to the English literary tradition. This perspective on the origins of West Indian literary nationalism then informs Edmondson's search for female subjectivity in current literature by West Indian women immigrants in America. Making Men compares the intellectual exile of men with the economic migration of women, linking the canonical male tradition to the writing of modern West Indian women & exploring how the latter write within & against the historical male paradigm in the continuing process of national definition. With theoretical claims that invite new discourse on English, Caribbean, & American ideas of exile, migration, race, gender identity, & literary authority, Making Men will be informative reading for those involved with postcolonial theory, African American & women's studies, & Caribbean literature.