Delusions and Discoveries India in the British Imagination, 1880-1930

by Parry, Benita

• ISBN13: 9781859841280
• ISBN10: 1859841287
• Edition: 00
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-12-17
• Publisher: VERSO

Summary

No cultural phenomenon of the 1970s and 1980s in Britain was more curious than the Raj revival, with its slew of films and fictions, its rage for memorabilia of imperial rule in India, and its strange nostalgia for a time and a world long since past. Today, with the arrival of so-called postcolonial studies, that revival lives on in a strange afterlife of critical study. Writing some years before Raj nostalgia became all the rage, and out of the rather different political and intellectual climate of 1960s national liberation struggles, Benita Parry produced what remains one of the landmark studies of British attitudes towards India. Available for the first time in paperback Delusions and Discoveries authoritatively surveys the mix of racist and jingoistic prejudices that dominated the writings of Anglo-Indians from Flora Annie Steele and Maud Diver to Kipling and beyond. The book also includes treatments of more liberal thinkers like Edmund Candler, Edward James Thompson and E. M. Forster, as well as a new preface by the author situating her work in relation to recent studies of the culture of colony and empire.

Author Biography

Benita Parry is an Associate Fellow in the English Department of Warwick University.

Table of Contents

Foreword	vii	(7)
Michael Sprinker
Acknowledgements	xiv
Preface to the Verso edition	1	(28)
Introduction	29	(6)
1 The British-Indian Encounter	35	(43)
2 The Romancers: Five Lady Novelists	78	(25)
3 Flora Annie Steel, 1847-1929	103	(24)
4 Edmund Candler, 1874-1926	127	(26)
5 Edward J. Thompson, 1886-1946	153	(33)
6 Rudyard Kipling, 1865-1936	186	(39)
7 E.M. Forster: A Passage to India	225	(24)
Bibliography	249	(13)
Biographical Information	262	(6)
Index	268