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

An examination of the theme of Imperial administration in Kipling, Conrad, T. E. Lawrence, Forster, Cary and Orwell.

Daniel Bivona (Author)

9780521591003, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 June 1998

252 pages
23.6 x 16 x 2 cm, 0.49 kg

"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

British Imperial Fiction, 1870–1940 traces the gradual process by which the colonial bureaucratic subject was constructed in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Daniel Bivona's study offers insightful readings of a number of influential writers who were involved in promoting the ideology of bureaucratic self-sacrifice, the most important of whom are Stanley, Kipling and T. E. Lawrence. He examines how this governing ideology is treated in the novels of Joseph Conrad, Joyce Cary and George Orwell. By placing the complexities of individual texts in a much larger historical context, this study makes the original claim that the colonial bureaucrat played an ambiguous but nonetheless central role in both pro-imperial and anti-imperial discourse, his own power relationship with bureaucratic superiors shaping the terms in which the proper relationship between colonizer and colonized was debated.

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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]