The Good Imperialists: Empire, National Identity, and Gender in British Theater, 1660-1790 (original) (raw)
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Book Review: Post-Empire Imaginaries?: Anglophone Literature, History and the Demise of Empires
Transnational Literature, 2017
The collection of essays collated by Barbara Buchenau, Virginia Richter and Marijke Denger in Post Empire Imaginaries?: Anglophone Literature, History and the Demise of Empires encapsulates an emerging critical theory that has come to be known as the Post-Empire. The term is less a commentary following the fall of Empire than a theoretics that seeks to establish the framework around which we now view the social, cultural, political and economic ramifications of empire on the contemporary consciousness. The introduction, by Buchenau and Richter, is an exposition dedicated to establishing the need for post-imperial criticism, they suggest that fictive literature provides a framework for an imaginative post-imperial position which allows a literary conceptualisation of empire which is at once playful and critical. However, Buchenau and Richter's conception of this post-empire imaginary has the tendency to romanticise the memory of empire. Furthermore, it is questionable as to how much of post-colonial criticism is consumed in the post-imperial approach and vice versa. Some of the collected essays suggest that the post-colonial is more keenly focused on the interplay between core and periphery, while others make little distinction between the post-colonial and the post-imperial. Rainer Emig's essay, The Hermeneutics of Empire: Imperialism as an Interpretation Strategy, poses an excellent counterpoint to Buchenau and Richter's post-empire romantics. Emig is diligent in his treatment of the great propaganda mill of imperial institution. Identifying the subtle cultural production of patriotism and imperial spirit in literary forms, Emig takes the opportunity to illustrate how post-colonial criticism, particularly in literature and film, challenged British imperial traditions. Emig focuses directly on the film adaptation of Rosemary Sutcliff's The Eagle of the Ninth, showing that the imperialistic and propagandistic tropes he exposes are prolific in the American film industry. Emig's essay gives consideration to the ways in which modern philosophy has forced us to reconsider the collective imagining of the imperial past. In a similar fashion, Eva Maria Müller exposes the discursive empire-building practices of education. Invoking Louis Althusser and Benedict Anderson, she illustrates the ways in which the teacher figure was utilised to reinforce imperial didacticism and how schools of the empire became outposts in service to continuing the displacement of subaltern cultures and societies through the institution of empire. While this is not a new concept in imperial theorising, Müller's study of the teacher figure 'as metonyms for the Australian nation' (101) contributes to the framework for a post-imperial analysis of education as an imperial institution. Kerstin Knopf takes a similar bent to Müller with regard to the moralising didacticism of the empire but manages to push the notion further through his exposition of imperial exploratory practice. Knopf establishes the mythologising of Arctic exploration in the collective British imperial consciousness as critical to its reputation as coloniser. Invoking Jen Hill, Knopf shows that the Arctic space represented the limit of both the British Empire and human experience and that the role of Arctic exploration was to 'break … this limit and transform it from an empty into an imperial space' (72). Looking at the lost expedition of Sir John Franklin in 1845, Knopf highlights the similarities between the British stoicism inherent in the myth of Franklin's voyage and that which is espoused by Victorian literature. In doing so, Knopf re-evaluates the role of imperial
Empire: The Nineteenth Century Global Novel in English
Globalization & Literary Studies, 2022
This chapter will address the integral role that literary writing in English, and especially the realist novel, played in imaginatively shaping, structuring and on occasion obscuring processes of nineteenth-century globalization, for which empire was the constitutive ground. We will observe how the novel composed what Raymond Williams called ‘structures of feeling’ that combined together human relationships and their wider contexts in communicable ways even when, as here, those contexts extended beyond the nation and took on global dimensions (Williams 1973: 158). Throughout, globalization will be taken as the incremental and unequal incorporation of non-capitalist regions of the world into the rising capitalist economies of Europe and then North America, a process accompanied by the uneven imposition of cultural, technological and infrastructural influence (Wallerstein 1996). We proceed in this chapter on the conviction that imperialism was an essential aspect of globalization through the long nineteenth century, redistributing wealth unevenly and restructuring the global economy in favour of imperial power. Globalization and empire were therefore folded into one another, taking on different features at their geographic and economic cores and peripheral edges. To capture two contrasting yet interestingly complementary views of this system, we therefore take our illustrative examples in this chapter from, on the one hand, Charles Dickens’s writing from the heart of empire in London, and, on the other, from the South African Olive Schreiner’s work set in – and mostly written from – zones of economic extraction.
British Subjects: Working Through the Legacy of Empire in Contemporary British Fiction
British Subjects: Working Through the Legacy of Empire in Contemporary British Fiction My research has continually focussed on certain key issues in literature and culture: history, nationhood and empire. In Constitutions, I analysed the constitutional texts of four modern nationstates: the Republic of Ireland, Australia, NZ and Britain. Drawing on the work of a range of theorists including Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Homi Bhabha, I theorised what constitutional texts were and the ways in which they constitute both national and diasporic cultures.
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 2023
This article argues for an essentially political definition of empire with sovereignty at its core, which recognises that British assertions of sovereignty were multiple, mutually contradictory and thus, taken together, incoherent. Tracing the history of conflict between different archetypes of sovereign authority, we argue that imperial crises occurred when empire's different ideas were forced to speak to one another, during world war, for example. The emphasis here on sovereignty and incoherence contrasts with conceptions of the history of the British empire which assert to the contrary that empire was a coherent entity. Such coherence can, we argue, only be maintained by treating empire as a metaphor for broader conceptions of power and thus collapsing the history of empire into other totalising meta-concepts such as global capitalism or Western cultural dominance. Recognition of the incoherence of imperial sovereignty offers new, more nuanced, readings of central concerns in the literature such as imperial violence and the economics of empire.
Empire on the English stage, 1660-1714
2001
Empire on the English stage, 1660-1714 / Bridget Orr. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. 323) and index. isbn 0 521 77350 4 1. English drama-Restoration, 1660-1700-History and criticism. 2. English drama-18th century-History and criticism. 3. Imperialism in literature. 4. Ethnicity in literature. 5. Colonies in literature. 6. Race in literature. i. Title. pr698.i45 o75 2001 822 .409358-dc21 00 065091 ISBN 0 521 77350 4 hardback Contents List of Illustrations page viii Acknowledgments ix
Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire
('Classical Presences' series), 2010
This volume brings together scholars of modern and ancient culture to explore historical, textual, material and theoretical interactions between classics and imperialism during the heyday of the British Empire from the late eighteenth through to its collapse in the early decades of the twentieth century. It examines the multiple dialogues that developed between Classics and colonialism in this period and argues that the two exerted a formative influence on each other at various levels. Most at issue in the contexts where Classics and empire converge is the critical question of ownership: to whom does the classical past belong? Did the modern communities of the Mediterranean have pre-eminent ownership of the visual, literary and intellectual culture of Greece and Rome? Or could the populations and intellectual centres of Northern Europe stake a claim to this inheritance? And in what ways could non-European communities and powers – Africa, India, America – commandeer the classical heritage for themselves? In exploring the relationship between classics and imperialism in this period, this volume examines trends that are of current importance both to the discipline of Classics and to modern British cultural and intellectual history. Both classics and empire, this volume contests, can be better understood by examining them in tandem: the development of classical ideas, classical scholarship and classical imagery in this period was often directly or indirectly influenced by empire and imperial authority, and the British Empire itself was informed, shaped, legitimised and evaluated using classical models.