"In a searching but sympathetic series of textual analyses, Wallace argues that the canon of eighteenth-century English Literature was bron out of the interplay between literary nationalism and an imperial internationalism. Imperial Characters will add considerably to the globalization of the discipline that has been underway for some years now."---Suvir Kaul, University of Pennsvlvania --
An analysis of the builders of the British Empire, how they were represented in popular culture of the day, and how that vision has changed over time. From the sixteenth until the twentieth century, British power and influence gradually expanded to cover one quarter of the world’s surface. The common saying was that “the sun never sets on the British Empire.” What began as a largely entrepreneurial enterprise in the early modern period, with privately run joint stock trading companies such as the East India Company driving British commercial expansion, by the nineteenth century had become, especially after 1857, a state-run endeavour, supported by a powerful military and navy. By the Victorian era, Britannia really did rule the waves. Heroes and Villains of the British Empire is the story of how British Empire builders such as Robert Clive, General Gordon, and Lord Roberts of Kandahar were represented and idealised in popular culture. The men who built the empire were often portrayed as possessing certain unique abilities which enabled them to serve their country in often inhospitable territories and spread what imperial ideologues saw as the benefits of the British Empire to supposedly uncivilised peoples in far flung corners of the world. These qualities and abilities were athleticism, a sense of fair play, devotion to God, and a fervent sense of duty and loyalty to the nation and the empire. Through the example of these heroes, people in Britain, and children in particular, were encouraged to sign up and serve the empire or, in the words of Henry Newbolt, “Play up! Play up! And Play the Game!” Yet this was not the whole story: while some writers were paid up imperial propagandists, other writers in England detested the very idea of the British Empire. And in the twentieth century, those who were once considered as heroic military men were condemned as racist rulers and exploitative empire builders.
"May Steven Saylor's Roman empire never fall. A modern master of historical fiction, Saylor convincingly transports us into the ancient world...enthralling!" —USA Today on Roma Continuing the saga begun in his New York Times bestselling novel Roma, Steven Saylor charts the destinies of the aristocratic Pinarius family, from the reign of Augustus to height of Rome's empire. The Pinarii, generation after generation, are witness to greatest empire in the ancient world and of the emperors that ruled it—from the machinations of Tiberius and the madness of Caligula, to the decadence of Nero and the golden age of Trajan and Hadrian and more. Empire is filled with the dramatic, defining moments of the age, including the Great Fire, the persecution of the Christians, and the astounding opening games of the Colosseum. But at the novel's heart are the choices and temptations faced by each generation of the Pinarii. Steven Saylor once again brings the ancient world to vivid life in a novel that tells the story of a city and a people that has endured in the world's imagination like no other.
Over the past decade, literary scholars have become increasingly engaged with colonial studies and have fashioned various points of focus in their investigations of imperialist narratives, including the figure of woman, cannibalism, the romance of the first encounter, and the tropicopolitan. This book builds on existing work by offering a new focal point: the evolution of the British imperial hero in America from Sir Walter Ralegh's Discoverie of... Guiana (1596) to James Grainger's The Sugar Cane (1764), with concentration on narratives produced between the year of Cromwell's Western Design (1655) and the British raid on Cartegena (1741). Each individual chapter isolates a distinct type of colonial hero, furnishing examples from a wide variety of narratives, including some nonfiction essays and tracts, but chiefly novels, plays, and poems.
The heroes of the British and French empires stood at the vanguard of the vibrant cultures of imperialism that emerged in Europe in the second-half of the nineteenth century. Their stories are well known. Scholars have tended to assume that figures such as Livingstone and Gordon, or Marchand and Brazza, vanished rapidly at the end of empire. Yet imperial heroes did not disappear after 1945, as British and French flags were lowered around the world. On the contrary, their reputations underwent a variety of metamorphoses in both the former metropoles and the former colonies. This book develops a framework to understand the complex legacies of decolonisation, both political and cultural, through the case study of imperial heroes. We demonstrate that the ‘decolonisation’ of imperial heroes was a much more complex and protracted process than the political retreat from empire, and that it is still an ongoing phenomenon, even half a century after the world has ceased to be ‘painted in red’. Whilst Decolonising Imperial Heroes explores the appeal of the explorers, humanitarians and missionaries whose stories could be told without reference to violence against colonized peoples, it also analyses the persistence of imperial heroes as sites of political dispute in the former metropoles. Demonstrating that the work of remembrance was increasingly carried out by diverse, fragmented groups of non-state actors, in a process we call ‘the privatisation of heroes’, the book reveals the surprising rejuvenation of imperial heroes in former colonies, both in nation-building narratives and as heritage sites. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.
Examines, through the lives of five important English and French figures, the history of the exploration and colonization of Africa between 1870 and 1914, and the role the mass media played in promoting colonial conquest.
In this study, Gould argues that it was in the imperial capital’s theatrical venues that the public was put into contact with the places and peoples of empire. Plays and similar forms of spectacle offered Victorian audiences the illusion of unmediated access to the imperial periphery; separated from the action by only the thin shadow of the proscenium arch, theatrical audiences observed cross-cultural contact in action. But without narrative direction of the sort found in novels and travelogues, theatregoers were left to their own interpretive devices, making imperial drama both a powerful and yet uncertain site for the transmission of official imperial ideologies. Nineteenth-century playwrights fed the public’s interest in Britain’s Empire by producing a wide variety of plays set in colonial locales: India, Australia, and—to a lesser extent—Africa. These plays recreated the battles that consolidated Britain’s hold on overseas territories, dramatically depicted western humanitarian intervention in indigenous cultural practices, celebrated images of imperial supremacy, and occasionally criticized the sexual and material excesses that accompanied the processes of empire-building. An active participant in the real-world drama of empire, the Victorian theatre produced popular images that reflected, interrogated, and reinforced imperial policy. Indeed, it was largely through plays and spectacles that the British public vicariously encountered the sights and sounds of the distant imperial periphery. Empire as it was seen on stage was empire as it was popularly known: the repetitions of character types, plot scenarios, and thematic concerns helped forge an idea of empire that, though largely imaginary, entertained, informed, and molded the theatre-going British public.
In Forms of Empire, Nathan K. Hensley shows how the modern state's anguished relationship to violence pushed writers to expand the capacities of literary form. The Victorian era is often imagined as an "age of equipoise," but the period between 1837 and 1901 included more than two hundred separate wars. What is the difference, though, between peace and war? Forms of Empire unpacks the seeming paradoxes of the Pax Britannica's endless conflict, showing that the much vaunted equipoise of the nineteenth-century state depended on physical force to guarantee it. But the violence hidden in the shadows of all law —the violence of sovereign power itself—shuddered most visibly into being at the edges of law's reach, in the Empire, where emergency was the rule and death perversely routinized. This book follows some of the nineteenth century's most astute literary thinkers—George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, A.C. Swinburne, H. Rider Haggard, and Robert Louis Stevenson among them—as they wrestled with the sometimes sickening interplay between order and force, and generated new formal techniques to account for fact that an Empire built on freedom had death coiled at its very heart. In contrast to the progressive idealism we have inherited from the Victorians, the writers at the core of Forms of Empire moved beyond embarrassment and denial in the face of modernity's uncanny relation to killing. Instead they sought effects—free indirect discourse, lyric tension, and the idea of literary "character" itself—that might render thinkable the conceptual vertigoes of liberal violence. In the process, they touched up to the dark core of our post-Victorian modernity. Drawing on archival work, literary analyses, and a theoretical framework that troubles the distinction between "historicist" and "formalist" approaches, Forms of Empire links the Victorian period to the present and articulates a forceful vision of why literary thinking matters now.
The Imperial Quest and Modern Memory explores relationships between narrative and imperium in the context of Western Modernism by examining the Quest as a vexed trope in Heart of Darkness, Passage to India, The Sheltering Sky, and The Quiet American. The book takes stock of twentieth century theory regarding the Quest--as archetype, trope, and construct, considers the dominant expression and the imperial organization of this trope in Western culture and iconography from the Dark Ages to the Age of Empire, explores the ways in which this trope both lingers and changes in the context of Western Modernism, and finally gauges its permutations in Modern discourse. The Imperial Quest and Modern Memory's central claim is that the Modern novel simultaneously reinscribes and subverts Western and imperial manifestations of the Quest. Heart of Darkness, Passage to India, The Sheltering Sky, and The Quiet American are remarkably Modern and subversive narratives. They participate in the revolutionary projects of early and high Modernism and are often in marked opposition to imperial praxis. Yet they are also profoundly influenced by the deep ideological and metaphoric structures of Western culture. Thus, the Quest trope--specifically in its Western and imperial manifestations--lingers in Modern Memory and certainly in the Modern novel. This expansive study emphasizes intriguing intersections between past and present, culture and archetype, norm and narrative, memory and contemporaneity.
