Reading the splendid body
Subtitle: gender and consumerism in eighteenth-century British writing on India
By: Nandini Bhattacharya.
Publisher: University of Delaware Press; Associated University Presses
Published: 1998
Place of publication: Newark; London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 232
Subjects: English literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism; Travelers' writings, English -- India -- History and criticism; British -- India -- History -- 18th century -- Historiography; Anglo-Indian literature -- History and criticism; Travel writing -- History -- 18th century; British -- India -- Intellectual life; Consumption (Economics) in literature; English literature -- Indic influences; Women and literature -- India; Body, Human, in literature; Sex role in literature
Description: This book surveys an underlying discourse on female and oriental consumerism in nearly four centuries of British colonialist narratives on India. It examines some of the significant ways in which the subaltern and female body was constructed by Western ethnographers within early modern British colonialist discourses. The book offers a genealogy of colonialist spectatorship, and examines the ideologies originating within both public and private colonial spheres.

Through a comparison of the discourses about and by women one can see the continuation of patriarchal injunctions within Western protofeminist discourses. Economic, ethical, colonial, patriarchal, and protofeminist polemics thus reached to and shaped one another, and this book is a record of the complex ways in which gender discourses and colonialist discourses intersected to create a colonialist spectatorship that constituted non-Western and female subjects as spectacular and needing discipline.

The insights on Western protofeminists and their crisis of self-representation as subjects versus objects of discourse also further the examination of women's history in the colonial arena.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 210-222) and index.