The contributions to this book amply demonstrate the richness, vitality, and complexity of the colonial transactions between Britain and India over the last two centuries, and they do so by approaching the topic from a specific perspective: by interpreting the rubric 'new readings' as broadly, creatively, and productively as possible. They cover a wide range of literary responses and genres: eighteenth-century drama, the gothic novel, verse, autobiography, history, religious writing, journalism, women's memoirs, travel writing, popular fiction, and the modernist novel. Brought together in one volume, these essays offer a small, but representative sample of the multifaceted literary and cultural traffic between Britain and India in the colonial period. In the richness and diversity of the various contributors' strategies and interpretations, these new readings urge us to return once again to texts that we think we know, as well as to explore those that we do not, with a freshly renewed sense of their complexity, immediacy, and relevance.

The book contains the role of the Ramacaritamanasa in the lives of

This chronology provides a concise and accurate outline of Forster's personal, literary and intellectual life from year to year in a series of crisply written diary entries. While the main focus is on his career as a writer of fiction, most of which falls between 1901 and 1924, the chronicle format also sheds new light on the extent and nature of Forster's political and public commitments during his middle years and into an active old age. Travel, friendships and wide reading are also documented to achieve a coherent picture of a full life. Drawing on numerous unpublished sources, including widely scattered letters and the Forster archive at King's College, Cambridge, this chronology makes available a wealth of new information about Forster the man and writer.

The orphaned Philadelphia Austen was forced to seek for herself those objects of eighteenth-century womanhood: social esteem and financial independence. Her story is circumscribed by the limitations of women’s lives of that time and opens up a wider exploration of those times through a detailed examination of one particular woman: Jane Austen’s ‘aunt Phila’. The story of her aunt had impressed the young Jane Austen when she created a character, Cecilia Wynne, in her short fiction, Catharine or the Bower, written when she was sixteen. Cecilia’s experience as an orphaned ‘girl of genius and feeling’ being ‘sent in quest of a husband to Bengal’, mirrored that of her recently deceased aunt. Such a connection between author and aunt sparked an interest in an otherwise neglected member of the Austen clan. How did this aunt who had provided inspiration for the young Jane manage to make her way in the world? How did the course of her life reflect the lives of other women of her times? What worlds did she move in? What people did she meet? Little was known about Philadelphia, yet her daughter Eliza, was said to be a central figure in Jane Austen’s life. The conventional trajectory Philadelphia’s was changed when, after completing a millinery apprenticeship in London, she took the chance of a journey to India and an arranged marriage. There she became part of the colorful world of the honorable East India Company and encountered many of its most notable people. Her life was transformed.

"Fichter has given us a powerful and authoritative book of major importance to students of empire and business alike." --

This book considers the controversy caused by 'nabobs', and the debate regarding British identity and British imperialism in the late eighteenth century.