Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860

Johnston analyses missionary writing under the aegis of the British Empire.

Anna Johnston (Author)

9780521049559, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 3 December 2007

280 pages, 2 b/w illus.
22.8 x 15 x 1.6 cm, 0.416 kg

' … well-researched and informative book …' Modern Language Review

Anna Johnston analyses missionary writing under the aegis of the British Empire. Johnston argues that missionaries occupied ambiguous positions in colonial cultures, caught between imperial and religious interests. She maps out this position through an examination of texts published by missionaries of the largest, most influential nineteenth-century evangelical institution, the London Missionary Society. These texts provide a fascinating commentary on nineteenth-century evangelism and colonialism, and illuminate complex relationships between white imperial subjects, white colonial subjects, and non-white colonial subjects. With their reformist, and often prurient interest in sexual and familial relationships, missionary texts focused imperial attention on gender and domesticity in colonial cultures. Johnston contends that in doing so they rewrote imperial expansion as a moral allegory and confronted British ideologies of gender, race and class. Texts from Indian, Polynesian and Australian missions are examined to highlight their representation of nineteenth-century evangelical activity in relation to gender, colonialism and race.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: writing missionaries
Part I. The Mission Statement: 1. The British Empire, colonialism and missionary activity
2. Gender, domesticity and colonial evangelisation
Part II. The London Missionary Society in India: 3. Empire, India and evangelisation
4. Missionary writing in India
5. Imperialism, suffragism and nationalism
Part III. The London Missionary Society in Polynesia: 6. Polynesian missions and the European imaginary
7. Missionary writing in Polynesia
Part IV. The London Missionary Society in Australia: 8. The Australian colonies and empire
9. Missionary writing in Australia
Conclusion: missionary writing, the imperial archive and postcolonial politics
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]