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This book examines fictional representations of India in novels, plays and poetry produced between the years 1772 to 1823 as historical source material. It uses literary texts as case studies to investigate how Britons residing both in the metropole and in India justified, confronted and imagined the colonial encounter during this period.

The twelve contributors to this book amply demonstrate the richness, vitality and complexity of the colonial transactions between Britain and India over the last two centuries, and they do so by approaching the topic from a specific perspective: by interpreting the rubric “new readings” as broadly, creatively and productively as possible. They cover a wide range of literary responses and genres: eighteenth-century drama, the gothic novel, verse, autobiography, history, religious writing, journalism, women's memoirs, travel writing, popular fiction, and the modernist novel. Brought together in one volume, these essays offer a small, but representative sample of the multifaceted literary and cultural traffic between Britain and India in the colonial period. In the richness and diversity of the various contributors'strategies and interpretations, these new readings urge us to return once again to texts that we think we know, as well as to explore those that we do not, with a freshly renewed sense of their complexity, immediacy, and relevance.

This book addresses the idea of'civility'as a manifestation of the fluidity and ambivalence of imperial power as reflected in British colonial literature and culture. Discussions of Anglo-Indian romances of 1880-1900, E.M. Forster's The Life to Come and Leonard Woolf's writings show how the appeal to civility had a significant effect on the constitution of colonial subject-hood and reveals'civility'as an ideal trope for the ambivalence of imperial power itself.

Tracing a genealogy of colonial discourse, Suleri focuses on paradigmatic moments in the multiple stories generated by the British colonization of the Indian subcontinent. Both the literature of imperialism and its postcolonial aftermath emerge here as a series of guilty transactions between two cultures that are equally evasive and uncertain of their own authority.'A dense, witty, and richly allusive book... an extremely valuable contribution to postcolonial cultural studies as well as to the whole area of literary criticism.'—Jean Sudrann, Choice

Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues demonstrates the continuing validity of the colonial paradigm as it maps the geographical, political, and imaginative space of'India/Indies'from the seventeenth century to the present. Breaking new ground in postcolonial studies, Jyotsna Singh highlights the interconnections among early modern colonial encounters, later manifestations in the Raj and their lingering influence in the postcolonial Indian nationalist state. Singh challenges the assumption of eye-witness accounts and unmeditated experiences implcit in colonial representational practices, and often left unchallenged in the postcolonial era. Essential introductory reading for students and academics, Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues re-evaluates the following texts: • seventeenth century travel narratives about India • eighteenth century'nabob'texts • letters of the Orientalist, Sir William Jones • reviews of Shakespearean productions in Calcutta and postcolonial Indo-Anglian novels

The continual, unpredictable, and often violent'traffic'between identities in colonial and postcolonial India is the focus of Parama Roy's stimulating and original book. Mimicry has been commonly recognized as an important colonial model of bourgeois/elite subject formation, and Roy examines its place in the exchanges between South Asian and British, Hindu and Muslim, female and male, and subaltern and elite actors. Roy draws on a variety of sources—religious texts, novels, travelogues, colonial archival documents, and films—making her book genuinely interdisciplinary. She explores the ways in which questions of originality and impersonation function, not just for'western'or'westernized'subjects, but across a range of identities. For example, Roy considers the Englishman's fascination with'going native,'an Irishwoman's assumption of Hindu feminine celibacy, Gandhi's impersonation of femininity, and a Muslim actress's emulation of a Hindu/Indian mother goddess. Familiar works by Richard Burton and Kipling are given fresh treatment, as are topics such as the'muscular Hinduism'of Swami Vivekananda.Indian Traffic demonstrates that questions of originality and impersonation are in the forefront of both the colonial and the nationalist discourses of South Asia and are central to the conceptual identity of South Asian postcolonial theory itself.The continual, unpredictable, and often violent'traffic'between identities in colonial and postcolonial India is the focus of Parama Roy's stimulating and original book. Mimicry has been commonly recognized as an important colonial model of bourgeois/el