Selected Resources for Literature and the British Empire

Brief Bibliography (these examples will get you started and give you an idea of the available range, but there's loads more out there!)

"Metropolitan"/British Perspectives (broadly speaking)

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories

E.M. Forster, Passage to India

H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines and She

Rudyard Kipling's novels and stories (Kim, The Jungle Books, etc)

Paul Scott's Raj Quartet

William Shakespeare, "The Tempest"

"Peripheral"/Colonial Perspectives

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven

J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

Salman Rushdie, especially his Midnight's Children

Secondary Accounts/Literary Criticism (all available in Norlin Library)

Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914

Nancy Henry, George Eliot and the British Empire (link to material from the book, including part of Chapter One)

Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Decolonizing the Mind

Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India

Poetry of Empire

W.H. Auden, "Partition"

    • Helen Goethals, "Poetry and History in the Context of W.H. Auden's Poem 'Partition'"

Sir John Betjeman, "In Westminster Abbey"

Rudyard Kipling, "Recessional"

Archibald MacLeish, "You, Andrew Marvell"

Percy Bysse Shelley, "Ozymandias of Egypt"

Oscar Wilde, "Ave Imperatrix"

and . . . Donald Rumsfeld?

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