with
your suggestions. This page last revised 18 May 1998
Brantlinger, Patrick.Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1830-1914. Ithaca, NY : Cornell UP,1988. Contains a chapter historically contextualising Thackeray's "India" novels and a discussion of literary representations of the Indian Mutiny and the incidents at Cawnpore.
Basham, A.L, ed. A Cultural History of India. Oxford: Clarendon,1975. Contains a section on modern Indian literature and the rise of fiction in the industrial age. Defends Narayan as an English language writer.
Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone.1868. Harmondsworth: Penguin,1994. An example of a Metropolitan writer negotiating the stereotypes of Indian psyche and culture in the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny.
Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son. 1848. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. Uses a minor character to demonstrate India as a place of escape from Metropolitan strictures, providing an example of the expectations of an earlier Imperialist ethos.
Featherstone, Donald. India from the Conquest of Sind to the Indian Mutiny. London: Blandell,1992. Designed to be a less academic, more approachable, survey of the events surrounding the Mutiny. A very detailed, day-by-day investigation of the Mutiny itself, including reportage from contemporary newspapers and eyewitness and diary accounts.
Forster, E.M. A Passage to India. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1924. Produced after two visits to India. Reflects Forster's observations of the relationship obetween Indian and British colonist and intended to demonstrate an essential lack of communication. The novel's riot scene recalls the Indian Mutiny.
Fowley Oaten,Edward. A Sketch of Anglo-Indian Literature. London: Trubnes, 1908. Described as the "pioneering attempt" (Srinivasa Iyengar) of criticism on Anglo-Indian literature. Oaten affords a summary of the major writers of the earliest fiction and identifies Kipling as the definitive Anglo-Indian novelist.
Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn. Cranford.1853.London: Dent, 1906. As in many colonial novels in which the Empire is used, such insertions create a formal displacement and suspension. Mr. Peter's departure and return are used by Gaskell as focal points of the novel and provide the basis of formal renewal; the novel entering into a new phase at each climax.
Hodson, H.V. The Great Divide: Britain, India, Pakistan. London: Hutchinson, 1969. Deals with the two partitions and also provides information on their background from the beginning of the twentieth-century. Hodson's demonstration of the unity and strength of the Raj corresponds with that of earlier historians of the Mutiny and provides a parallel, not only with nineteenth-century colonial literature, but with some postcolonial Indian literary theory of the 1960s.
Kipling, Rudyard. Kim.1901. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1994. A novelist and poet popularly derided as the epitome of British colonialist writers, Kipling displays only rudimentary elements of this in Kim. His first-hand knowledge of India is apparent throughout this novel, as is his willingness to explore sympathetically the nature of both Indian country and culture. It is, for the time, a sophisticated and original attempt to break through the boundaries of Anglo-Indian literature.
Jhabvala Prawer, Ruth. Heat and Dust. London:Futura,1975. The most famous of Jhabvala's novels dealing with both Indian and British culture before and after Independence. Jhabvala writes from a Western perspective but has an intimate knowledge of India.
Narayan,R.K. The Vendor of Sweets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. Demonstrates Narayan's initiation of Western naturalism into postcolnial Indian writing. Frequently compared to Graham Greene, Narayan displays the same sense of sublimated drama, though within a domestic context, and the same acknowledgement of the inevitability of social forces.
Rubin, David. After the Raj: British Novels of India Since 1947. NH:UP of New England, 1986. Discusses writers both before and after 1947 who have dealt with pre-Independence India. Contains useful analyses of both Kipling and E.M.Forster.
Rushdie,Salman. Midnight's Children. London: Cape, 1981. Winner of the 1981 Booker Prize and 1993 Booker of Bookers. Rushdie, with this novel, extends Anglo-Irish literature into the international arena of Garcia Marquez, Kundera and Grass and earns the reputation of being India's definitive postmodernist writer.
Ruutz Rees, L.E. The Siege of Lucknow. London: Longman, 1858. An eyewitness account of the siege of Lucknow, interesting from a literary as well as an historical point of view. A good example of the journalism which inspired metropolitan attitudes towards the Mutiny.
Spear,Percival. A History of India.Vol 2. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. A standard history covering the period from the rise of the Mughal Empire to the death of Nehru. The revised edition includes information on the administration of Indira Ghandi and the Emergency.
Srinivasa Iyengar, K.R. Indian Writing in English. London: Asia Publishing House, 1962. Contains an analysis of Narayan's earlier works contextualised within a body of literature by both political and literary writers.
Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair.1848. London: Pan, 1967. Includes scenes of the military in Madras and the Anglo-Indian society attached to it. Another example of Imperial displacement: Dobbin returns to resolve one strand of the plot by eventually marrying Amelia Sedley; Jos Sedley resolves his family's poverrty with his new-found wealth.
Azim, Firdous. The Colonial Rise Of The Novel. London; Routledge, 1993. A useful book which draws on the associations between the rise of feminism and colonial criticism.
Cronin, Richard. Imagining India. London; Macmillan Press Limited, 1989. Contains an interesting chapter discussing Kim and Midnight’s Children as novels which should be termed ‘English Indian’ rather than either English or Indian.
Gruner, Elisabeth Rose. ‘Family Secrets And The Mysteries Of The Moonstone.’ Eds. John Maynard, Adrienne Auslander Munch. Victorian Literature and Culture. Vol 21. New York; Ams Press, 1994. As the title implies this article links a disordered metropolitan centre to imperial agendas abroad.
Heller, Tamar. Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins And The Female Gothic. New Haven and London; Yale University Press, 1992. Heller signals parallels in the subjectification of women within the Victorian institution of marriage and the subjectification of a feminized, colonised people.
Lonoff, Sue.Wilkie Collins And His Victorian Readers. New York; Ams Press inc, 1982. This book reveals the social and cultural context within which the novels appeared.
Parry, Benita. Delusions And Discoveries: Studies On India In The British Imagination1880 - 1930. London; Penguin, 1972. A wide-ranging book which, amongst other things, discusses how Kipling’s belief in imperialism necessarily countenanced racism even though the texts themselves are more complex than this implies.
Sullivan, Zoreh T. Narratives Of Empire: The Fictions Of Rudyard Kipling.Great Britain; Cambridge University Press, 1993. A very useful book which reveals the contradictory impulses of Kipling’s colonial mind.
This project was completed under the direction of Dr Leon Litvack as a requirement for the MA degree in Modern Literary Studies in the School of English at the Queen's University of Belfast. The site is evolving and will include contributions from future generations of MA students on other writers and themes.
This page was written by Tara Fallon and Tricia Doyle.
E-mail Tricia
with
your suggestions.
The Imperial Archive Project is
supervised by Leon Litvack. E-mail
me with
your suggestions.
