British India and Victorian Literary Culture

British India and Victorian Literary Culture extends current scholarship on the Victorian period with a wide-ranging and innovative analysis of the literature of British India.

The book traces the development of British Indian literature from the early days of the nineteenth century through the Victorian period. Previously unstudied poems and essays drawn from the thriving periodicals culture of British India are examined alongside novels and travel-writing by authors including Emma Roberts, Philip Meadows Taylor and Rudyard Kipling. Key events and concerns of Victorian India – the legacy of the Hastings impeachment, the Indian ‘Mutiny’, the sati controversy, the rise of Bengal nationalism - are re-assessed within a dual literary and political context, emphasising the engagement of British writers with canonical British literature (Scott, Byron) as well as the mythology and historiography of India and their own responses to their immediate surroundings. Ní Fhlathúin examines representations of the experience of being in India, in chapters on the poetry and prose of exile, and the dynamics of consumption. She also analyses colonial representations of the landscape and societies of India itself, in chapters on the figure of the bandit / hero, female agency and self-sacrifice, and the use of historiography to enlist indigenous narratives in the project of Empire.

Description and analysis of the literary marketplace and periodical press, both previously neglected

Reassessment of some works of Kipling in the context of a long-standing literary tradition of British India

New analysis of the interactions of metropolitan and colonial literary cultures, and the impact of canonical texts on peripheral marketplaces

Examination of Victorian concepts of the colonial relationship in the light of both important writers of British India (Kipling, Meadow Taylor) and others previously unstudied

Máire ní Fhlathúin is Associate Professor in English Literature at the University of Nottingham.