Title: Reading the splendid body
First published: December 1997
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.
Subjects: History and criticism, English literature, British, History, Historiography, Consumption (Economics) in literature, Anglo-Indian literature, Indic influences, Intellectual life, Sex role in literature, Women and literature, Travel writing, Body, Human, in literature, Travelers' writings, English, Human body in literature, English literature, history and criticism, 18th century, Travel
Places: India
Time periods: 18th century
LC classification: PR129.I5 B49 1998