Author: Phebe Gibbes
Translator(s)/ Edito: Michael J Franklin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2007
Language: English
Pages: 222
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0195685644
Description
Written at the time of the Warren Hastings impeachment and set in the period of Hastings’s Orientalist government of India, Hartly House, Calcutta (1789) is a dramatic representation of the Anglo-Indian encounter.
This novel represents a key document in the literary representation of India and the imperial debate, profoundly challenging pre-existent discourses of colonialism. At the time, it set out to achieve Hastings’s reconciliation between ‘the People of England’ and ‘the Natives of Hindostan’, in the belief that Hindu civilization had much to teach the West. Beyond offering a radical feminization of India, it introduced an open and sentimentalized version of the Indological scholarship, which facilitated Romantic Orientalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The openness of Gibbes’s heroine Sophia Goldborne to Hindu culture, and her determination to learn its fundamental tenets from a young Brahman pandit are based upon the tolerance and pluralism of this brief period of sympathetic and syncretic admiration in Indo-British history.
From the standpoints of both materialist feminist scholarship and postcolonial theory, Hartly House, Calcutta problematizes the intricate relationships between mercantile capitalism, colonial trade, issues of race, religion, and class, national identity, and British constructions of gender within the colony and the metropolis. An informed introduction and notes on the text by the editor are included.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on the Text
Introduction
HARTLEY HOUSE, CALCUTTA
Volume I
Volume II
Volume III
Explanatory Notes
Select Bibliography