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Catharine Macaulay represented everything the eighteenth century abhorred in a woman. She was learned, politically-minded, and actively engaged with public and philosophical issues of the day. Her private life, and especially her "imprudent" second marriage to a man twenty-six years her junior, led ...

Catharine Macaulay represented everything the eighteenth century abhorred in a woman. She was learned, politically-minded, and actively engaged with public and philosophical issues of the day. Her private life, and especially her "imprudent" second marriage to a man twenty-six years her junior, led to much malicious gossip. Yet in her lifetime she also won considerable fame as the author of an eight-volume history of England in the seventeenth century, a republican, a follower of John Wilkes, and a political polemicist who engaged with Edmund Burke. She not only influenced the nature of eighteenth-century radicalism in England, but also played an important contributory role in shaping American revolution ideology. Among her American friends and correspondents were Mercy Otis Warren, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Ezra Stiles, and George Washington. Long before the Revolution, she was also closely concerned with events in France. Both Mirabeau and Brissot were familiar with her History and much influenced by it; translated into French it was welcomed by patriots as an effective response to the counter-revolutionary influence of Hume's history. The first major biographical study of this remarkable and influential figure, this book should not be ignored by anyone interested in English radicalism or revolutionary politics.

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 ...

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.