George Eliot and the British Empire

George Eliot and the British Empire PDF Author: Nancy Henry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139432699
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
In this study Nancy Henry introduces a set of facts that place George Eliot's life and work within the contexts of mid-nineteenth-century British colonialism and imperialism. Henry examines Eliot's roles as an investor in colonial stocks, a parent to emigrant sons, and a reader of colonial literature. She highlights the importance of these contexts to our understanding of both Eliot's fiction and her situation within Victorian culture. Henry argues that Eliot's decision to represent the empire only as it infiltrated the imaginations and domestic lives of her characters illuminates the nature of her Realism. The book also re-examines the assumptions of postcolonial criticism about Victorian fiction and its relation to empire.

George Eliot and the British Empire

George Eliot and the British Empire PDF Author: Nancy Henry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139432699
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 199

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this study Nancy Henry introduces a set of facts that place George Eliot's life and work within the contexts of mid-nineteenth-century British colonialism and imperialism. Henry examines Eliot's roles as an investor in colonial stocks, a parent to emigrant sons, and a reader of colonial literature. She highlights the importance of these contexts to our understanding of both Eliot's fiction and her situation within Victorian culture. Henry argues that Eliot's decision to represent the empire only as it infiltrated the imaginations and domestic lives of her characters illuminates the nature of her Realism. The book also re-examines the assumptions of postcolonial criticism about Victorian fiction and its relation to empire.

Understanding the British Empire

Understanding the British Empire PDF Author: Ronald Hyam
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521115221
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 575

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Book Description
A study of key themes in the history of the British Empire by one of the senior figures in the field.

The British Empire and the Hajj

The British Empire and the Hajj PDF Author: John Slight
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674915828
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
The British Empire at its height governed more than half the world’s Muslims. It was a political imperative for the Empire to present itself to Muslims as a friend and protector, to take seriously what one scholar called its role as “the greatest Mohamedan power in the world.” Few tasks were more important than engagement with the pilgrimage to Mecca. Every year, tens of thousands of Muslims set out for Mecca from imperial territories throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, from the Atlantic Ocean to the South China Sea. Men and women representing all economic classes and scores of ethnic and linguistic groups made extraordinary journeys across waterways, deserts, and savannahs, creating huge challenges for officials charged with the administration of these pilgrims. They had to balance the religious obligation to travel against the desire to control the pilgrims’ movements, and they became responsible for the care of those who ran out of money. John Slight traces the Empire’s complex interactions with the Hajj from the 1860s, when an outbreak of cholera led Britain to engage reluctantly in medical regulation of pilgrims, to the Suez Crisis of 1956. The story draws on a varied cast of characters—Richard Burton, Thomas Cook, the Begums of Bhopal, Lawrence of Arabia, and frontline imperial officials, many of them Muslim—and gives voice throughout to the pilgrims themselves. The British Empire and the Hajj is a crucial resource for understanding how this episode in imperial history was experienced by rulers and ruled alike.

Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807-1930

Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807-1930 PDF Author: Deborah Epstein Nord
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231510330
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807-1930, is the first book to explore fully the British obsession with Gypsies throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Deborah Epstein Nord traces various representations of Gypsies in the works of such well-known British authors John Clare, Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, George Eliot, Arthur Conan Doyle, and D. H. Lawrence. Nord also exhumes lesser-known literary, ethnographic, and historical texts, exploring the fascinating histories of nomadic writer George Borrow, the Gypsy Lore Society, Dora Yates, and other rarely examined figures and institutions. Gypsies were both idealized and reviled by Victorian and early-twentieth-century Britons. Associated with primitive desires, lawlessness, cunning, and sexual excess, Gypsies were also objects of antiquarian, literary, and anthropological interest. As Nord demonstrates, British writers and artists drew on Gypsy characters and plots to redefine and reconstruct cultural and racial difference, national and personal identity, and the individual's relationship to social and sexual orthodoxies. Gypsies were long associated with pastoral conventions and, in the nineteenth century, came to stand in for the ancient British past. Using myths of switched babies, Gypsy kidnappings, and the Gypsies' murky origins, authors projected onto Gypsies their own desires to escape convention and their anxieties about the ambiguities of identity. The literary representations that Nord examines have their roots in the interplay between the notion of Gypsies as a separate, often despised race and the psychic or aesthetic desire to dissolve the boundary between English and Gypsy worlds. By the beginning of the twentieth century, she argues, romantic identification with Gypsies had hardened into caricature-a phenomenon reflected in D. H. Lawrence's The Virgin and the Gipsy-and thoroughly obscured the reality of Gypsy life and history.

George Eliot's English Travels

George Eliot's English Travels PDF Author: Kathleen McCormack
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134238606
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
George Eliot’s more than fifty long and short journeys within England took her to dozens of sites scattered around the country. Revising the traditional notion that George Eliot drew her settings and characters only from the areas of her Warwickshire childhood, Kathleen McCormack demonstrates that English travel furnished the novelist with a wide variety of originals for the composite characters and settings she would so memorably create. McCormack traces the way in which George Eliot gathered material during her travels and also drafted long sections of the novels while away from her London home. She argues that by examining the choices George Eliot made in transforming, discarding or directly describing her English originals, we might take a significant step forward in the interpretation of her writings. Where other critics have tried to interpret characters as one-to-one renderings of living or dead models, for example, this study reveals more elaborate blendings of what George Eliot called the ‘widely sundered elements’ that made up her fiction. McCormack also reaches the fascinating conclusion that the novels were a form of coded communication between the author and people in her life, including other prominent Victorians such as Edward Burne-Jones, Robert Lytton and Barbara Bodichon. Presenting fresh biographical information and original insights into George Eliot’s writing strategies, George Eliot’s English Travels promises a decisive shift in our understanding of one of the most important figures in Victorian literature.

Imperial Ecology

Imperial Ecology PDF Author: Peder Anker
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674005952
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Aelian's Historical Miscellany is a pleasurable example of light reading for Romans of the early third century. Offering engaging anecdotes about historical figures, retellings of legendary events, and descriptive pieces - in sum: amusement, information, and variety - Aelian's collection of nuggets and narratives could be enjoyed by a wide reading public. A rather similar book had been published in Latin in the previous century by Aulus Gellius; Aelian is a late, perhaps the last, representative of what had been a very popular genre. Here then are anecdotes about the famous Greek philosophers, poets, historians, and playwrights; myths instructively retold; moralizing tales about heroes and rulers, athletes and wise men; reports about styles in dress, foods and drink, lovers, gift-giving practices, entertainments, religious beliefs and death customs; and comments on Greek painting. Some of the information is not preserved in any other source. Underlying it all are Aelian's Stoic ideals as well as this Roman's great admiration for the culture of the Greeks (whose language he borrowed for his writings).

The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot

The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot PDF Author: George Levine
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521664738
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
This volume of essays is comprehensively, scholarly and lucidly written, and at the same time offers original insights into the work of one of the most important Victorian novelists, and into her complex and often scandalous career.

Victorious Century

Victorious Century PDF Author: David Cannadine
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525557903
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 626

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Book Description
A sweeping history of nineteenth-century Britain by one of the world's most respected historians. "An evocative account . . .[Cannadine] tells his own story persuasively and exceedingly well.” —The Wall Street Journal To live in nineteenth-century Britain was to experience an astonishing and unprecedented series of changes. Cities grew vast; there were revolutions in transportation, communication, science, and work--all while a growing religious skepticism rendered the intellectual landscape increasingly unrecognizable. It was an exhilarating time, and as a result, most of the countries in the world that experienced these changes were racked by political and social unrest. Britain, however, maintained a stable polity at home, and as a result it quickly found itself in a position of global leadership. In this major new work, leading historian David Cannadine has created a bold, fascinating new interpretation of nineteenth-century Britain. Britain was a country that saw itself at the summit of the world and, by some measures, this was indeed true. It had become the largest empire in history: its political stability positioned it as the leader of the new global economy and allowed it to construct the largest navy ever built. And yet it was also a society permeated with doubt, fear, and introspection. Repeatedly, politicians and writers felt themselves to be staring into the abyss and what is seen as an era of irritating self-belief was in fact obsessed with its own fragility, whether as a great power or as a moral force. Victorious Century is a comprehensive and extraordinarily stimulating history--its author catches the relish, humor and staginess of the age, but also the dilemmas faced by Britain's citizens, ones we remain familiar with today.

The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot

The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot PDF Author: Gertrude Himmelfarb
Publisher: Encounter Books
ISBN: 1594032513
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
This book examines why a woman who was firmly labeled an unbeliever would take up the cause of Judaism and its promise of nationhood and statehood.

The Life of George Eliot

The Life of George Eliot PDF Author: Nancy Henry
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118917677
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The life story of the Victorian novelist George Eliot is as dramatic and complex as her best plots. This new assessment of her life and work combines recent biographical research with penetrating literary criticism, resulting in revealing new interpretations of her literary work. A fresh look at George Eliot's captivating life story Includes original new analysis of her writing Deploys the latest biographical research Combines literary criticism with biographical narrative to offer a rounded perspective