British Imperial Literature, 1870 1940: Writing and the Administration of Empire

ISBN-13: 9780521591003 / Angielski / Twarda / 1998 / 252 str.

Daniel Bivona

Opis

This book is a sweeping study of the way British writers used imperial service as a stage for dramatizing new modes of social order and self-consciousness. An expanding administrative machine, Bivona argues, naturalized and domesticated bureaucratic forms of social control, inscribing the ideals of service, submission, discipline, and renunciation in the hearts and minds of the young men employed in administrating the empire. Bivona examines how this governing ideology is treated in Kipling, Conrad, T. E. Lawrence, Forster, Cary and Orwell.

Recenzje

"Daniel Bivona's analysis spendidly assists in clarfying how what he terms the European bureaucratic subject, working in the service of imperial governmance and expansion, is both instrument and agent...Bivona provides a commanding review of the growth of imperial bureaucracy in the nineteeth century...Bivona's excellent study...Bivona's book is an orginal and much needed contribution to the already large group of studies dealing with the workings of Victorian and early-twentieth-century empire." Victorian Studies

Spis treści

Introduction; 1. Agents and the problem of agency: the context; 2. Why Africa needs Europe: from Livingstone to Stanley; 3. Kipling's 'Law' and the division of bureaucratic labor; 4. Agent, instrument, and novelist: Cromer, Gordon, Conrad and the problem of imperial character; 5. 'Gladness of abasement': T. E. Lawrence and the erotics of imperial discipline; 6. Resurrecting individualism: the interwar novels of imperial manners; Conclusion: work as rule; Bibliography.