Author: Sara Suleri
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 230
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0143032836
Description
Sara Suleri’s The Rhetoric of English India is a powerful challenge to the obsession with Otherness that is a trademark of colonial studies. Where other scholars tend to observe a strict separation between works by Western and non-Western writers and between ruling and subject races, Suleri reconstructs a narrative in which English and Indian idioms play with, and against, each other.
By studying a wide range of materials, from the writings of Burke to the travel logs of nineteenth-century women such as Fanny Parkes and Harriet Tytler to the fiction of Kipling, Forster, Naipaul and Rushdie, Suleri deftly reveals the complicity that always operates in colonial literature. In doing so, Suleri succeeds not only in challenging the standard chronology of imperial history, but also in fundamentally recasting contemporary discourse on the theories of cultural empowerment.
REVIEWS & COMMENTS:
An extremely valuable contribution to postcolonial cultural studies as well as to the whole area of literary criticism.
- Jean Sudrann, Choice
The Rhetoric of English remains one of the most enduring testaments of "colonial cultural studies" imbued with a more enhanced degree of self-reflexivity about its own practices.
- Vinay Lal, Economic and Political Weekly
One of the most comprehensive, detailed, probing account o the issues involved in postcolonial cultural studies.
A monumental contribution to an important area of scholarship.
- Houston A Baker Jr, University of Pennsylvania
The most brilliant contribution to postcolonial criticism since Edward Said's Orientalism. A masterpieece of calm, well-thought-out, cogent and inspiring analysis.
- Jane Marcus, Cuny Graduate Center and the City Unioversity of New York.
Contents
Acknowledgements
The Rhetoric of English India
Edmund Burke and the Indian Sublime
Reading the Trial of Warren Hastings
The Feminine Picturesque
The Adolescence of kim
Forester's Imperial Erotic
Naipaul's Arrival
Salman Rushdie : Embodiment of Blasphemy. Censorship of Shame
Notes
Index