Author: Indrani Sen
Publisher: Orient Longman
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 204
ISBN/UPC (if available): 139788125033462
Description
The book presents detailed readings, which are fresh and insightful. Stimulating and cogent, it will appeal to those interested in gender, literary and cultural studies, in colonial discourse and in the interconnections between history, narrative and ideology.
Drawing upon a wide range and variety of literary and non-literary sources of nineteenth-century British India, 'Woman and Empire' examines perceptions of gender over the 1858-1900 period. The book focuses on representations of white and Indian women, in addition to women of mixed race, in fiction as well as in colonial newspapers and journals.
In six closely-argued chapters, Indrani Sen shows how sexuality intersects with gender, race and class in complex ways. Exploring the tensions and contradictions inherent in these representations of women, the author studies them against a canvas of social history and probes the large agendas that they fed into.
The book presents detailed readings, which are fresh and insightful of the fiction of Philip Meadows Taylor, Flora Annie Steel and Rudyard Kipling. Particularly fascinating is Sen's discussion of a corpus of 'minor' writings of the period, not usually read, let alone scrutinized, in comparable studies.
Stimulating and cogent, this book will appeal to those interested in gender, literary and cultural studies, in colonial discourse and in the interconnections between history, narrative and ideology.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Women, Ideology, Empire: Inventing the White Woman in Nineteenth-Century British India
Satis, Bibis, 'Purdahnashins': Anglo-India and the Indian Woman
Gender and 'Imperial Citizenship': Nineteenth-Century British Raj Fiction
(Re)presenting Chivalric Rescue: The Novels of Philip Meadows Taylor
Gender and the White (Wo)man's Burden: flora Annie Steel
Imagining (Anglo) India: Rudyard Kipling and the Construction of Women
Epilogue
Glossary
Bibliography
Index