Imperial characters
Subtitle: home and periphery in eighteenth-century literature
By: Tara Ghoshal Wallace
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Lewisburg [Pa.]
Language: eng
Number of pages: 244
ISBN-13: 9780838757406
Description: ""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" "During the long eighteenth century, Britain, won and lost an empire in North America while consoldiating its hegemony on the Indian subcontinent. The idea of imperial Britain became an essential piece of national self-definition, so that to be British was to be a citizen of an imprial power. The British literary imagination inevitably participated in the formulation and interrogation of this new national character, examining in fiction empire's effects on the world at home. Imperial Characters traces a range of literary articulations of how British national character is formed, changed, and distorted by the imperial project. Tara Wallace argues that each text she considers, from Aphra Behn's early description of seventeenth-century colonists in Surinam to Robert Louis Stevenson's historical narrative about eighteenth-century Scotsmen roaming the globe, enacts the opportunities, disruptions, and dangers of imperial adventurism. Through close readings of works by Behn, Pope, Thomson, Defoe, Smollett, Bage, Hamilton, Scotl, and Stevenson, contextualized within hsitorical moments, Wallace persuasively shows how literary texts rehearse the risks incurred in the course of imperial expansion, not only to British lives but also to cherished national values."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction. Roaming the globe: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Robert Louis Stevenson's Master of Ballantrae; title: Global nationalisms: Alexander Pope's Windsor-forest and James Thomson's Seasons; title: Familial identifications: Daniel Defoe's Colonel Jack and Moll Flanders and Tobias Smollett's Humphry Clinker; between empires: Wollstonecraft's Maria, or, The wrongs of woman; title: Peripheral visions: Robert Bage's Hermsprong and Elizabeth Hamilton's Letters of a Hindoo rajah; title: Rhetorical manipulations: Walter Scott's Guy Mannering and The surgeon's daughter.