British imperial literature, 1870-1940 : writing and the administration of empire

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British imperial literature, 1870-1940 : writing and the administration of empire

Daniel Bivona

Cambridge University Press, 2008

  • : pbk

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"This digitally printed version 2008"--T.p. verso

First published in 1998

Bibliography: p. 227-233

Includes index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

British Imperial Fiction, 1870-1940 traces the gradual process by which the colonial bureaucratic subject was constructed in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Daniel Bivona's study offers insightful readings of a number of influential writers who were involved in promoting the ideology of bureaucratic self-sacrifice, the most important of whom are Stanley, Kipling and T. E. Lawrence. He examines how this governing ideology is treated in the novels of Joseph Conrad, Joyce Cary and George Orwell. By placing the complexities of individual texts in a much larger historical context, this study makes the original claim that the colonial bureaucrat played an ambiguous but nonetheless central role in both pro-imperial and anti-imperial discourse, his own power relationship with bureaucratic superiors shaping the terms in which the proper relationship between colonizer and colonized was debated.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction
  • 1. Agents and the problem of agency: the context
  • 2. Why Africa needs Europe: from Livingstone to Stanley
  • 3. Kipling's 'Law' and the division of bureaucratic labor
  • 4. Agent, instrument, and novelist: Cromer, Gordon, Conrad and the problem of imperial character
  • 5. 'Gladness of abasement': T. E. Lawrence and the erotics of imperial discipline
  • 6. Resurrecting individualism: the interwar novels of imperial manners
  • Conclusion: work as rule
  • Bibliography.

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