British India and Victorian Literary Culture

A wide-ranging and innovative analysis of the literature of British India
The book traces the development of British Indian literature from the early days of the nineteenth century through the Victorian period. Previously unstudied poems and essays drawn from the thriving periodical culture of British India are examined alongside novels and travel-writing by authors including Emma Roberts, Philip Meadows Taylor and Rudyard Kipling. Key events and concerns of Victorian India - the legacy of the Hastings impeachment, the Indian 'Mutiny', the sati controversy, the rise of Bengal nationalism - are re-assessed within a dual literary and political context, emphasising the engagement of British writers with canonical British literature (Scott, Byron) as well as the mythology and historiography of India and their own responses to their immediate surroundings.
Key Features
- Describes and analyses the literary marketplace and periodical press of British India
- Reassesses some of Kipling's works in the context of a long-standing literary tradition of British India
- Provides new analysis of interactions between metropolitan and colonial literary cultures, and the impact of canonical texts on peripheral marketplaces
- Examines Victorian concepts of the colonial relationship in the light of both established and previously unstudied writers of British India

Máire ni Fhlathúin is a Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Nottingham.