Description
Book SynopsisA major contribution to the cultural and literary history of the Victorian age, this book maps the complex relationship between Victorian literary forms, genres, and theories and imperialist, racist ideology.
Trade ReviewRule of Darkness is a significant contribution to studies seeking to reveal how the English in the nineteenth century created demeaning and often destructive images of Mrica and the East, images that continue to haunt twentieth-century writing, films, and attitudes.
* Conradiana *
An outstanding analysis of imperialism in 19th-century British literature.... Brantlinger deploys a real wealth of material, providing fresh insights at every turn.
* Times Higher Education Supplement *
The path-breaking work Brantlinger has done opens up the terrain of Victorian culture in refreshing and remarkable ways. His analysis of the imperialist impulse in many heretofore isolated phases of Victorian culture is both inspiring and dependable, a rare combination. Rule of Darkness will undoubtedly be complemented and extended by the work of others in the near future, but it is hard to see how it could be surpassed.
* Novel *
This learned and incisive study shows how deeply imperialist assumptions pervade Victorian narratives from the adventure yarn through the realist novel and the 'Imperial Gothic' of fantasy fiction. Brantlinger both colonizes a range of noncanonical texts and explores the imperialist darkness at the heart of such standard authors as Macaulay and Thackeray, Kipling and Conrad.... His mapping of overgrown paths between Victorian liberalism and imperialism, abolitionism and racism, are invaluable guides to the imaginative politics of the last century.
* Virginia Quarterly Review *
Table of ContentsIntroductionPART I. DAWN
1. From Dawn Island to Heart of Darkness
2. Bringing Up the Empire: Captain Marryats MidshipmenPART II. NOON
3. Thackeray's India
4. Black Swans; or, Botany Bay Eclogues
5. The New Crusades
6. The Genealogy of the Myth of the "Dark Continent"
7. The Well at Cawnpore: Literary Representations of the Indian Mutiny of 1857PART III. DUSK
8. Imperial Gothic: Atavism and the Occult in the British Adventure Novel, 1880–1914
9. Epilogue: Kurtz's "Darkness" and Conrad’s Heart of DarknessNotes
Index
