'This book convincingly challenges both the extremely short historical memory of most postcolonial work and the all-too-insularly English world still conjured by period specialists. Hogarthian whores and Grub Street hacks, coffee houses and fashionable pastimes, and the burgeoning of print culture all stand revealed as intimately bound to portents of plantation insurgency, agitation for abolition, and the vast fortunes produced by the labouring bodies of the poor, the colonized, and the enslaved. Eighteenth-century studies has never appeared in a more engaged and fascinating light.'Professor Donna Landry, University of KentIn this volume Suvir Kaul addresses the relations between literary culture, English commercial and colonial expansion, and the making of 'Great Britain' in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He argues that literary writing played a crucial role in generating the vocabulary of British nationalism, both in inter-national terms and in attempts to realign political and cultural relations between England, Scotland, and Ireland. The formal innovations and practices characteristic of eighteenth-century English literature were often responses to the worlds brought into view by travel writers, merchants, and colonists. Writers (even those suspicious of mercantile and colonial expansion) worked with a growing sense of a 'national literature' whose achievements would provide the cultural capital adequate to global imperial power, and would distinguish Great Britain for its twin success in 'arms and arts'. The book ranges from Davenant's theatre to Smollet's Roderick Random to Phillis Wheatley's poetry to trace the impact of empire on literary creativity.Key Features*An introduction to the impact of mercantilism and empire on the crafting of eighteenth-century British literature*Encourages students to examine the key formal innovations that define eighteenth-century British literary history as they were produced by writers who redefined

Phillis Wheatley's poetry to trace the impact of empire on literary creativity." --Book Jacket.

«In many ways», Robert J.C. Young writes, «colonization from the very first carried with it the seeds of its own destruction.» Imperial Affliction examines some ways in which Young's observation could be applied to problems of subjectivity and influence within the colonizing nations themselves, particularly eighteenth-century Britain. How might these «seeds of destruction» manifest themselves as problems of identity? How might the very selves with greatest access to self-affirmation - the idea of the empire, the idea of British citizenry, the idea of the British self - actually find themselves vulnerable, confused, or damaged? Using multiple forms of postcolonial critique, this book turns back to salient eighteenth-century British lives and work for a different kind of enlightenment. Among its central subjects are the elusive subjectivity of William Collins; the exilic religious experience of William Cowper and its multiple readings in the twentieth century by a self-fashioned exilic, Donald Davie; the «missed encounter» between Christopher Smart and Samuel Johnson, and the ways in which that problem was re-inscribed in the work of W. Jackson Bate and Lionel Trilling; the problem of imperial fixity in James Cook's journals with a view to Gray's «Elegy» and Goldsmith's «Deserted Village»; and the problem of purity as a paradoxically privileged and exilic force in the work of John Newton and Christopher Smart. In these explorations, this book illustrates both an expanded view of eighteenth-century colonial liabilities and a new emphasis on postcolonial critique as a means of exploring the fissures always present in imperial ambition.

An interdisciplinary study of visual representations of British colonial power in the eighteenth century.

This book surveys the impact of the British Empire on nineteenth-century British literature from a postcolonial perspective. It explains both pro-imperialist themes and attitudes in works by major Victorian authors, and also points of resistance to and criticisms of the Empire such as abolitionism, as well as the first stirrings of nationalism in India and elsewhere.Using nineteenth-century literary works as illustrations, it analyzes several major debates, central to imperial and postcolonial studies, about imperial historiography and Marxism, gender and race, Orientalism, mimicry, and subalternity and representation. And it provides an in-depth examination of works by several major Victorian authors-Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Disraeli, Tennyson, Yeats, Kipling, and Conrad among them - in the imperial context. Key Features:*Links literary texts to debates in postcolonial studies*Discusses works not included in standard literary histories*Provides in-depth discussions and comparisons of major authors: Disraeli and George Eliot; Dickens and Charlotte Bronte; Tennsyon and Yeats*Provides a guide to further reading and a timeline

This interdisciplinary volume attempts to expand the temporal and geographic agenda of postcolonial studies.

Provides a fresh account of modernist writing in a perspective based on the reading strategies developed by postcolonial studiesNeither modernity nor colonalism (and likewise, neither postmodernity nor postcoloniality) can be properly understood without recognition of their intertwined development. This book interprets modernity as an asymmetrically global phenomenon complexly connected to the course of Western imperialism, and demonstrates how the impact of Western modernism produced new developments in writing from all the former colonies of Europe and the US. These developments constitute the afterlife of Western modernism.The various ways in which the aesthetic ideologies and writing strategies of Western modernism have been adapted, transposed and modified by some of the most innovative writers of the twentieth century is demonstrated in the book through a set of case studies, each of which juxtaposes a canonical modernist text with a postcolonial text that shows how modernist modes metamorphosed in interaction with the turbulent and volatile realities of colonies and new nations struggling to arrive at a modernity of their own in contexts marked by colonial histories. Thus Kafka's allegories are juxtaposed with the use of allegory in writers like Salman Rushdie and J.M.Coetzee; the gendered modernity of Virginia Woolf is juxtaposed with the disturbing and powerful fictions of writers such as Jean Rhys and Katherine Mansfield; the intellectualized and urbanized spirituality of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land is re-read in the revisionist contexts created by the brilliant and troubled urban spirituality of writers such as Arun Kolatkar from India and a text such as The Woman Who Had Two Navels, from the Philippines.