Description
Book SynopsisBrokering Culture in Britain''s Empire and the Historical Novel examines the relationship between the historical sensibilities of nineteenth-century British and American romancers and the conceptual frameworks that eighteenth-century imperial interlocutors used to imagine and critique their own experiences of Britain's diffused, tenuous, and often accidental authority. Salyer argues that this cultural experience, more than what Lukács had in mind when he wrote of a mass historical consciousness after Napoleon, gave rise to the Romantic historiographical approach of writers such as Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Brockden Brown and Frederick Marryat. This book traces the conversion of the eighteenth-century imperial speaker into the nineteenth-century romance hero through a number of proto-novelistic responses to the problem of Imperial history, including Edmund Burke in the Annual Register and the celebrated court case of James Annesley, among others. The author argues tha
Trade ReviewBrokering Culture is a provocative reimagining of eighteenth-century political and economic forces as they intersect with contradictory human factors in the haphazard and tragic founding of the [First] British Empire and the myths that cloak it. Salyer gives us a peek behind the curtain of romance and nationalism, where a cast of criminals, conmen, adventures, and outcasts are transformed into the heroes and villains of James Fenimore Cooper, Sir Walter Scott, and Rudyard Kipling. -- D. Michael Jones, East Tennessee State University
From Horace Walpole's broken windows at Strawberry Hill to far-flung reaches of the British empire, Matthew Salyer in Brokering Culture in Britain's Empire and the Historical Novel covers a vast expanse of historical and literary territory. As questions of "British" identity became complicated by the rapid expansion of empire in the 18th and 19th centuries, fiction became a space in which some of the tensions could be explored. In illuminating these tensions, Salyer impresses with his broad range and thoughtful selections, touring us through a fascinating array of literary texts and primary source material. Colorful anecdotes and personalities abound. Salyer's treatment of 18th- and 19th-century legal issues in a literary context makes a particularly distinctive contribution. This is an intelligent and captivating study. -- Steven P. Harthorn, University of Northwestern, St. Paul
Table of ContentsIntroduction: When We “empired in the empire”: The Problem of Narrating Imperial Time and Place in an Imperial Time and Place
Chapter One: “A little false geography”: Edmund Burke as Edward Waverley
Chapter Two: “The empire of the father continues even after his death”: Edgar Huntly, James Annesley, and the Eighteenth-Century Orphan Redemptioner Narrative
Chapter Three: Still “under Sir William”: Locum Tenens, Cooper’s Leatherstocking, and the Tragic View of the American Revolution
Chapter Four: “Revolution is a work of blood”: Nationalism, Horror, and Mercantile Empire in Frederick Marryat’s The Phantom Ship
Chapter Five: “Buried in their strange decay”: Lost Letters, Lost Races, and Imperial (Mis)translations
Chapter Six: “Just as Government’s a mere matter of form”: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Imperial Romanticism, and the Art of “Personation”
Chapter Seven: Coda: “And to show us your books”: Kipling’s Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan as “Romance-Monger” and Reader
