Indian Angles

by Gibson, Mary Ellis

• ISBN13: 9780821419410
• ISBN10: 0821419412
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-08-02
• Publisher: Ohio Univ Pr

Summary

InIndian Angles,Mary Ellis Gibsonprovides a new historical approach to Indian English literature. Gibson shows that poetry, not fiction, was the dominant literary genre of Indian writing in English until 1860 and that poetry written in colonial situations can tell us as much or even more about figuration, multilingual literacies, and histories of nationalism than novels can. Gibson recreates the historical webs of affiliation and resistance that were experienced by writers in colonial India-writers of British, Indian, and mixed ethnicities. Advancing new theoretical and historical paradigms for reading colonial literatures,Indian Anglesmakes accessible many writers heretofore neglected or virtually unknown. Gibson recovers texts by British women, by non-elite British men, and by persons who would, in the nineteenth century, have been called Eurasian. Her work traces the mutually constitutive history of English language poets from Sir William Jones to Toru Dutt and Rabindranath Tagore. Drawing on contemporary postcolonial theory, her work also provides new ways of thinking about British internal colonialism as its results were exported to South Asia. In lucid and accessible prose, Gibson presents a new theoretical approach to colonial and postcolonial literatures.

Author Biography

Mary Ellis Gibson is Class of 1952 Distinguished Professor of English, University of North Carolina Greensboro. Her books include History and the Prism of Art: Browning’s Poetic Experiments and Epic Reinvented: Ezra Pound and the Victorians. She has also edited several other anthologies, including New Stories by Southern Women, Homeplaces: Stories of the South by Women Writers, and Critical Essays on Robert Browning.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
A Note on Names	p. xv
Introduction	p. 1
Languages, Tropes, and Landscape in the Beginnings of English Language Poetry
Contact Poetics in Eighteenth-Century Calcutta	p. 17
Bards and Sybils: Landscape, Gender, and the Culture of Dispute in the Poems of H. L. V. Derozio	p. 63
The Institutions of Colonial Mimesis, 1830-57
Books, Reading, and the Profession of Letters: David Lester Richardson and the Construction of a British Canon in India	p. 101
Sighing, or Not, for Albion	p. 137
Nationalisms, Religion, and Aestheticism in the Late Nineteenth Century
From Christian Piety to Cosmopolitan Nationalisms: The Dutt Family Album and the Poems of Mary E. Leslie	p. 184
Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Aestheticism in Fin-de-Siée London	p. 227
Epilogue	p. 268
Notes	p. 281
Bibliography	p. 309
Index	p. 325
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