Imperial characters: home and periphery in eighteenth-century literature

Product 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.
About the Author
Tara Ghoshal Wallace was born in India and grew up in Calcutta and Washington D.C. She is Professor of English at The George Washington University, where she also serves as Associate Dcan for Graduate Studies in Arts and Sciences: The editor of Frances Burney's A Busy Day (1984) and co-editor of Women Critics 1660-1820: An Anthology (1995), Professor Wallace is the author of Jane Austen and Narrative Authority (1996), and of numerous articles on Austen, Walter Scott, Dr. Johnson, Frances Burney, Tobias Smollett, and Elizabeth Hamilton

Bucknell Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture Series Editor: Greg Clingliam

Jacket illustration: One of the thousands of 11th-century carvings onthe Hindu temples at Khajuraho, in the state of Madhya Pradesh, India. This image depicts a mode of execution: having an elephant crush the miscreant's skull. Taken by the author in March 2008.