Download or read book Anxieties of Empire and the Fiction of Intrigue written by Yumna Siddiqi and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century stories of detection, policing, and espionage by British and South Asian writers, Yumna Siddiqi presents an original and compelling exploration of the cultural anxieties created by imperialism. She suggests that while colonial writers use narratives of intrigue to endorse imperial rule, postcolonial writers turn the generic conventions and topography of the fiction of intrigue on its head, launching a critique of imperial power that makes the repressive and emancipatory impulses of postcolonial modernity visible. Siddiqi devotes the first part of her book to the colonial fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle and John Buchan, in which the British regime's preoccupation with maintaining power found its voice. The rationalization of difference, pronouncedly expressed through the genre's strategies of representation and narrative resolution, helped to reinforce domination and, in some cases, allay fears concerning the loss of colonial power. In the second part, Siddiqi argues that late twentieth-century South Asian writers also underscore the state's insecurities, but unlike British imperial writers, they take a critical view of the state's authoritarian tendencies. Such writers as Amitav Ghosh, Michael Ondaatje, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie use the conventions of detective and spy fiction in creative ways to explore the coercive actions of the postcolonial state and the power dynamics of a postcolonial New Empire. Drawing on the work of leading theorists of imperialism such as Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and the Subaltern Studies historians, Siddiqi reveals how British writers express the anxious workings of a will to maintain imperial power in their writing. She also illuminates the ways South Asian writers portray the paradoxes of postcolonial modernity and trace the ruses and uses of reason in a world where the modern marks a horizon not only of hope but also of economic, military, and ecological disaster.
Download or read book Anxieties of Empire and the Fiction of Intrique written by Yumna Siddiqi and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Insecurity State written by Mark Condos and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-03 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative examination of how the British colonial experience in India was shaped by chronic unease, anxiety, and insecurity.
Download or read book War Espionage and Masculinity in British Fiction written by Susan L. Austin and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2023-05-23 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'War, Espionage, and Masculinity in British Fiction' explores the masculinities represented in British works spanning more than a century. Studies of Rudyard Kipling’s 'The Light That Failed' (1891) and Erskine Childer’s 'The Riddle of the Sands' (1903) investigate masculinities from before World War I, at the height of the British Empire. A discussion of R.C. Sherriff’s play 'Journey’s End' takes readers to the battlefields of World War I, where duty and the harsh realities of modern warfare require men to perform, perhaps to die, perhaps to be unmanned by shellshock. From there we see how Dorothy Sayers developed the character of Peter Wimsey as a model of masculinity, both strong and successful despite his own shellshock in the years between the world wars. Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (1948) and The Quiet American (1955) show masculinities shaken and questioning their roles and their country’s after neither world war ended all wars and the Empire rapidly lost ground. Two chapters on 'The Innocent' (1990), Ian McEwan’s fictional account of a real collaboration between Great Britain and the United States to build a tunnel that would allow them to spy on the Soviet Union, dig deeply into the 1950’s Cold War to examine the fictional masculinity of the British protagonist and the real world and fictional masculinities projected by the countries involved. Explorations of Ian Fleming’s 'Casino Royale' (1953) and 'The Living Daylights' (1962) continue the Cold War theme. Discussion of the latter film shows a confident, infallible masculinity, optimistic at the prospect of glasnost and the potential end of Cold War hostilities. John le Carré’s 'The Night Manager' (1993) and its television adaptation take espionage past the Cold War. The final chapter on Ian McEwan’s 'Saturday' (2005) shows one man’s reaction to 9/11.
Download or read book Policing Transnational Protest written by Daniel Brückenhaus and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Policing Transnational Protest offers an original perspective on the history of police surveillance of anticolonial activists in France, Britain, and Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. Tracing the undertakings of anticolonial activists from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East in Europe and reconstructing the reaction of European governments, it illuminates the increasing cooperation of the police and secret services to monitor the activities of the "oriental revolutionaries" and curb their room to maneuver. But those efforts had an unintended inflammatory effect, provoking both supporters and opponents of colonial rule to understand the conflict in increasingly global and trans-imperial terms. The surveillance also exacerbated tensions between Europeans friendly to the anticolonial cause, and those who prioritized imperial security over civil liberties and national sovereignty. Tracking growing levels of transnational government cooperation against anticolonialists, this book pays special attention to Germany, where many activists were able to carry out their political work in relative safety after escaping surveillance in Britain and France. By analyzing the emergence of ever more sophisticated counter-terrorism schemes and surveillance apparatuses, Br ckenhaus also contributes a pre-history of similar phenomena characterizing the post-9/11 world. He shows how, then as now, an intensification of a "war on terror" went hand in hand with concerns about encroachments on civil liberties, often expressed in open protest against such governance measures. Policing Transnational Protest informs current debates about intelligence gathering and surveillance in several European countries as well as their new cooperative partner, the United States.
Download or read book Criminal Cities written by Molly Slavin and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2023-05-24 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why does crime feature at the center of so many postcolonial novels set in major cities? This book interrogates the connections that can be found between narratives of crime, cities, and colonialism to bring to light the ramifications of this literary preoccupation, as well as possibilities for cultural, aesthetic, and political catharsis. Examining late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels set in London, Belfast, Mumbai, Sydney, Johannesburg, Nairobi, and urban areas in the Palestinian West Bank, Criminal Cities considers the marks left by neocolonialism and imperialism on the structures, institutions, and cartographies of twenty-first-century cities. Molly Slavin suggests that literary depictions of urban crime can offer unique capabilities for literary characters, as well as readers, to process and negotiate that lingering colonial violence, while also providing avenues for justice and forms of reparations.
Download or read book Clues A Journal of Detection Vol 42 No 1 Spring 2024 written by Caroline Reitz and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2024-05-17 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over two decades, Clues has included the best scholarship on mystery and detective fiction. With a combination of academic essays and nonfiction book reviews, it covers all aspects of mystery and detective fiction material in print, television and movies. As the only American scholarly journal on mystery fiction, Clues is essential reading for literature and film students and researchers; popular culture aficionados; librarians; and mystery authors, fans and critics around the globe.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Sherlock Holmes written by Janice M. Allan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-02 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accessible exploration of Sherlock Holmes and his relationship to late-Victorian culture as well as his ongoing significance and popularity.
Download or read book The Postcolonial Indian Novel in English written by Geetha Ganapathy-Doré and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2011-01-18 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Indian writers of English such as G. V. Desani, Salman Rushdie, Amit Chaudhuri, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, Allan Sealy, Shashi Tharoor, Arundhati Roy, Vikram Chandra and Jhumpa Lahiri have taken the potentialities of the novel form to new heights. Against the background of the genre’s macro-history, this study attempts to explain the stunning vitality, colourful diversity, and the outstanding but sometimes controversial success of postcolonial Indian novels in the light of ongoing debates in postcolonial studies. It analyses the warp and woof of the novelistic text through a cross-sectional scrutiny of the issues of democracy, the poetics of space, the times of empire, nation and globalization, self-writing in the auto/meta/docu-fictional modes, the musical, pictorial, cinematic and culinary intertextualities that run through this hyperpalimpsestic practice and the politics of gender, caste and language that gives it an inimitable stamp. This concise and readable survey gives us intimations of a truly world literature as imagined by Francophone writers because the postcolonial Indian novel is a concrete illustration of how “language liberated from its exclusive pact with the nation can enter into a dialogue with a vast polyphonic ensemble.”
Download or read book Empire Under the Microscope written by Emilie Taylor-Pirie and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-11-26 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book considers science and empire, and the stories we tell ourselves about them. Using British Nobel laureate Ronald Ross (1857-1932) and his colleagues as access points to a wider professional culture, Empire Under the Microscope explores the cultural history of parasitology and its relationships with the literary and historical imagination between 1885 and 1935. Emilie Taylor-Pirie examines a wealth of archival material including medical lectures, scientific publications, popular biography, and personal and professional correspondence, alongside novels, poems, newspaper articles, and political speeches, to excavate the shared vocabularies of literature and medicine. She demonstrates how forms such as poetry and biography; genres such as imperial romance and detective fiction; and modes such as adventure and the Gothic, together informed how tropical diseases, their parasites, and their vectors, were understood in relation to race, gender, and nation. From Ancient Greece, to King Arthur’s Knights, to the detective work of Sherlock Holmes, parasitologists manipulated literary and historical forms of knowledge in their professional self-fashioning to create a modern mythology that has a visible legacy in relationships between science and society today.
Download or read book The Critical Reception of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle written by Laurence W. Mazzeno and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2023 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines both academic and popular assessments of Conan Doyle's work, giving pride of place to the Holmes stories and their adaptations, and also attending to the wide range of his published work. Twenty-first-century readers, television viewers, and moviegoers know Arthur Conan Doyle as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, the world's most recognizable fictional detective. Holmes's enduring popularity has kept Conan Doyle in the public eye. However, Holmes has taken on a life of his own, generating a steady stream of critical commentary, while Conan Doyle's other works are slighted or ignored. Yet the Holmes stories make up only a small portion of Conan Doyle's published work, which includes mainstream and historical fiction; history; drama; medical, spiritualist, and political tracts; and even essays on photography. When Doyle published - whatever the subject - his contemporaries took note. Yet, outside of the fiction featuring Sherlock Holmes, until recently relatively little has been done to analyze the reception Conan Doyle's work received during his lifetime and since his death. This book examines both academic and popular assessments of Conan Doyle's work, giving pride of place to the Holmes stories and their many adaptations for print, visual, and online media, but attending to his other contributions to turn-of-the-twentieth-century culture as well. The availability of periodicals and newspapers online makes it possible to develop an assessment of Conan Doyle's (and Sherlock Holmes's) reputation among a wider readership and viewership, thus allowing for development of a broader and more accurate portrait of Doyle's place in literary and cultural history.
Download or read book Genres of Emergency written by Ayelet Ben-Yishai and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-02-09 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Genres of Emergency offers literary genre as a way to understand and negotiate the varied states of emergency and crisis that have become a fixture of our contemporary world. Building on a critical study of the literature written during and about the State of Emergency declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in India (1975 - 1977), the study establishes emergency and its genres as an important interpretative site: an exceptionally violent episode marked as a one-off crisis, which also functions as a locus for an ongoing renegotiation of a modern polity and culture. Reading a wide-ranging archive of English-language texts - from prison memoir to popular magazine, from high-brow literary fiction to boilerplate thriller, from the unrelentingly realistic to the mythically allegorical - Genres of Emergency traces the tension between crisis and continuity that these genres mediate. In addressing this tension, the authors of Emergency fiction take seriously the genres in which they write and use them to mobilize literary conventions as political interventions. More specifically, these novels use the conventions of realism, epic, allegory, and the thriller to reach back in time and across cultures and languages, invoking past iterations of these genres and histories and anticipating those to come. Combining literary criticism with cultural history, Genres of Emergency thus has implications for the study of literary genre, for the historical events that these genres recount, and for understanding the politics of literary form.
Download or read book Animals in Detective Fiction written by Ruth Hawthorn and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-12-06 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the vast array of animals that populate detective fiction. If the genre begins, as is widely supposed, with Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), then detective fiction’s very first culprit is an animal. Animals, moreover, consistently appear as victims, clues, and companions, while the abstract conception of animality is closely tied to the idea of criminality. Although it is often described as an essentially conservative form, detective fiction can unsettle the binary of human and animal to intersect with developing concerns in animal studies: animal agency, the ethical complexities of human/animal interaction, the politics and literary aesthetics of violence, and animal metaphor. Gathering its 14 essays into sections on ontologies, ethics, politics, and forms, Animals in Detective Fiction provides a compelling and nuanced analysis of the central role creatures play in this enduringly popular and continually morphing literary form.
Download or read book Postcolonial Biology written by Deepika Bahri and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2017-12-15 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the body has been a vast subject for postcolonial studies, few theorists have attempted to go beyond the simple mixing of races in examining the impact of colonialism on the colonized body. However, as Deepika Bahri argues, it is essential to see the postcolonial body in a variety of forms: as capable of transformation not only in psyche and outward behavior but also in flesh and blood. European colonizers brought new ways of seeing the body in matters as basic as how to eat, speak, sit, shit, or spit. As nations decolonized, these imperialistic ideas remained, becoming part of the global economy of the body. In Postcolonial Biology, Bahri argues that the political challenges of the twenty-first century require that we deconstruct these imperial notions of the body, as they are fundamental to power structures governing today’s globalized world. Postcolonial Biology investigates how minds and bodies have been shaped by colonial contact, to create deeply embedded hierarchies among the colonized. Moving beyond “North/South” thinking, Bahri reframes the questions of postcolonial bodies to address all societies, whether developed or developing. Engaging in innovative, highly original readings of major thinkers such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Derrida, and Fanon, this book brings an important new focus to the field of postcolonial studies—one that is essential to understanding the ideas and conflicts that currently dominate the global order.
Download or read book Approaches to Teaching the Works of Amitav Ghosh written by Gaurav Desai and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2019-05-01 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The prizewinning author of novels, nonfiction, and hybrid texts, Amitav Ghosh grew up in India and trained as an anthropologist. His works have been translated into over thirty languages. They cross and mix a number of genres, from science fiction to the historical novel, incorporating ethnohistory and travelogue and even recuperating dead languages. His subjects include climate change, postcolonial identities, translocation, migration, oceanic spaces, and the human interface with the environment. Part 1 of this volume discusses editions of Ghosh's works and the scholarship on Ghosh. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," present ideas for teaching his works through considerations of postcolonial feminism, historicity in the novels, environmentalism, language, sociopolitical conflict, genre, intersectional reading, and the ethics of colonized subjecthood. Guidance for teaching Ghosh in different contexts, such as general education, world literature, or single-author classes, is provided.
Download or read book Gothic Invasions written by Ailise Bulfin and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2018-03-28 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do tales of stalking vampires, restless Egyptian mummies, foreign master criminals, barbarian Eastern hordes and stomping Prussian soldiers have in common? As Gothic Invasions explains, they may all be seen as instances of invasion fiction, a paranoid fin-de-siècle popular literary phenomenon that responded to prevalent societal fears of the invasion of Britain by an array of hostile foreign forces in the period before the First World War. Gothic Invasions traces the roots of invasion anxiety to concerns about the downside of Britain’s continuing imperial expansion: fears of growing inter-European rivalry and colonial wars and rebellion. It explores how these fears circulated across the British empire and were expressed in fictional narratives drawing strongly upon and reciprocally transforming the conventions and themes of gothic writing. Gothic Invasions enhances our understanding of the interchange between popular culture and politics at this crucial historical juncture, and demonstrates the instrumentality of the ever-versatile and politically-charged gothic mode in this process.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel written by Ato Quayson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel provides an engaging account of the postcolonial novel, from Joseph Conrad to Jean Rhys. Reflecting the development of postcolonial literary studies into a significant and intellectually vibrant field, this Companion explores genres and theoretical movements such as magical realism, crime fiction, ecocriticism, and gender and sexuality. Written by a host of leading scholars in the field, this book offers insight into the representative movements, cultural settings, and critical reception that define the postcolonial novel. Covering subjects from disability and diaspora to the sublime and the city, this Companion reveals the myriad traditions that have shaped the postcolonial literary landscape, and will serve as a valuable resource to students and established scholars alike.
