Title: Colonial power, colonial texts
First published: 1997
Description: In Colonial Power, Colonial Texts, M. Keith Booker examines a number of British novels that deal with colonial rule in India in the first half of the twentieth century. The works discussed - by authors such as Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster, George Orwell, Paul Scott, and J. G. Farrell - date from both the colonial and postcolonial periods, and Booker pays attention as well to representations of India in both British and American popular culture, especially film.

These various cultural texts open multiple viewpoints on the role of literature in the British vision of India and the role of India in the British conception of literature.

Drawing particularly on the work of Georg Lukacs and Fredric Jameson, Booker focuses on the treatment of British colonial power in these fictions as that treatment indicates how colonialism and decolonization participate in a larger historical process of modernization. The author uses a Marxist model of bourgeois cultural revolution to illustrate the ways these texts engage in productive exchanges with their historical context.

Colonial Power, Colonial Texts will be of particular value to those who study the role of culture in colonialism and anti-colonial resistance, as well as to students and scholars of modern British literature and culture.
Subjects: History and criticism, Indic influences, English literature, Intellectual life, British, English fiction, Colonies in literature, Imperialism in literature, Anglo-Indian fiction, In literature, English fiction, history and criticism, 20th century, English literature, foreign influences, India, in literature
Places: India
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: PR888.I6 B66 1997