Dark Vanishings

by Brantlinger, Patrick

• ISBN13: 9780801438097
• ISBN10: 0801438098
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-09-01
• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr

Summary

Patrick Brantlinger here examines the commonly held nineteenth century view that all "primitive" or "savage" races around the world were doomed sooner or later to extinction. Warlike propensities and presumed cannibalism were regarded as simultaneously noble and suicidal, accelerants of the downfall of other races after contact with while civilization. Brantlinger finds at the heart of this belief the stereotype of the self-exterminating savage, or the view that "savagery" is a sufficient explanation for the ultimate disappearance of "savages" from the grand theater of world history. Humanitarians, according to Brantlinger, saw the problem in the same terms of inevitability (or doom) as did scientists such as Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley as well as propagandists for empire such as Charles Wentworth Dilke and James Anthony Froude. Brantlinger analyzes the Irish Famine in the context of ideas and theories about primitive races in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere. He shows that by the end of the nineteenth century, especially through

Author Biography

Patrick Brantlinger is Rudy Professor of English and Victorian Studies at Indiana University

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
1. Introduction: Aboriginal Matters	1	(16)
2. Pre-Darwinian Theories on the Extinction of Primitive Races	17	(28)
3. Vanishing Americans	45	(23)
4. Humanitarian Causes: Antislavery and Saving Aboriginals	68	(26)
5. The Irish Famine	94	(23)
6. The Dusk of the Dreamtime	117	(24)
7. Islands of Death and the Devil	141	(23)
8. Darwin and After	164	(25)
9. Conclusion: White Twilights	189	(12)
Notes	201	(22)
Works Cited	223	(20)
Index	243