Download or read book Empire Boys Adventures in a Man s World written by Joseph Bristow and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-08-27 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1991. Focusing on ‘boys' own’ literature, this book examines the reasons why such a distinct type of combative masculinity developed during the heyday of the British Empire. This book reveals the motives that produced this obsessive focus on boyhood. In Victorian Britain many kinds of writing, from the popular juvenile weeklies to parliamentary reports, celebrated boys of all classes as the heroes of their day. Fighting fit, morally upright, and proudly patriotic - these adventurous young men were set forth on imperial missions, civilizing a savage world. Such noble heroes included the strapping lads who brought an end to cannibalism on Ballantyne's "Coral Island" who came into their own in the highly respectable "Boys' Own Paper", and who eventually grew up into the men of Haggard's romances, advancing into the Dark Continent. The author here demonstrates why these young heroes have enjoyed a lasting appeal to readers of children's classics by Stevenson, Kipling and Henty, among many others. He shows why the political intent of many of these stories has been obscured by traditional literary criticism, a form of criticism itself moulded by ideals of empire and ‘Englishness’. Throughout, imperial boyhood is related to wide-ranging debates about culture, literacy, realism and romance. This is a book of interest to students of literature, social history and education.

Download or read book Kipling s Imperial Boy written by D. Randall and published by Springer. This book was released on 2000-10-11 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kipling's Imperial Boy opens by examining the significance of boyhood in the evolution of European modernity. Chapter one shows how closely the figure of the adolescent (the 'boy') is associated with questions of imperial expansion and consolidation. The chapters that follow take up Rudyard Kipling's fiction of the imperial boy, emphasizing the imaginative link between adolescence and cultural hybridity and offering detailed readings of The Jungle Book, Stalky & Co ., and Kim.

Download or read book Empire Boys Adventures in a Man s World written by Joseph Bristow and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-08-27 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1991. Focusing on ‘boys' own’ literature, this book examines the reasons why such a distinct type of combative masculinity developed during the heyday of the British Empire. This book reveals the motives that produced this obsessive focus on boyhood. In Victorian Britain many kinds of writing, from the popular juvenile weeklies to parliamentary reports, celebrated boys of all classes as the heroes of their day. Fighting fit, morally upright, and proudly patriotic - these adventurous young men were set forth on imperial missions, civilizing a savage world. Such noble heroes included the strapping lads who brought an end to cannibalism on Ballantyne's "Coral Island" who came into their own in the highly respectable "Boys' Own Paper", and who eventually grew up into the men of Haggard's romances, advancing into the Dark Continent. The author here demonstrates why these young heroes have enjoyed a lasting appeal to readers of children's classics by Stevenson, Kipling and Henty, among many others. He shows why the political intent of many of these stories has been obscured by traditional literary criticism, a form of criticism itself moulded by ideals of empire and ‘Englishness’. Throughout, imperial boyhood is related to wide-ranging debates about culture, literacy, realism and romance. This is a book of interest to students of literature, social history and education.

Download or read book The Obsolete Empire written by Philip Tsang and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernist literature at the end of the British empire challenges conventional notions of homeland, heritage, and community. Finalist of the MSA First Book Prize by The Modernist Studies Association The waning British empire left behind an abundance of material relics and an inventory of feelings not easily relinquished. In The Obsolete Empire, Philip Tsang brings together an unusual constellation of writers—Henry James, James Joyce, Doris Lessing, and V. S. Naipaul—to trace an aesthetics of frustrated attachment that emerged in the wake of imperial decline. Caught between an expansive Britishness and an exclusive Englishness, these writers explored what it meant to belong to an empire that did not belong to them. Thanks to their voracious reading of English fiction and poetry in their formative years, all of these writers experienced a richly textured world with which they deeply identified but from which they felt excluded. The literary England they imagined, frozen in time and out of place with the realities of imperial decline, in turn figures in their writings as a repository of unconsummated attachments, contradictory desires, and belated exchanges. Their works arrest the linear progression from colonial to postcolonial, from empire to nation, and from subject to citizen. Drawing on a rich body of scholarship on affect and temporality, Tsang demonstrates how the British empire endures as a structure of desire that outlived its political lifespan. By showing how literary reading sets in motion a tense interplay of intimacy and exclusion, Tsang investigates a unique mode of belonging arising from the predicament of being conscripted into a global empire but not desired as its proper citizen. Ultimately, The Obsolete Empire asks: What does it mean to be inside or outside any given culture? How do large-scale geopolitical changes play out at the level of cultural attachment and political belonging? How does literary reading establish or unsettle narratives of who we are? These questions preoccupied writers across Britain's former empire and continue to resonate today.

Download or read book Imperial Encounters written by Peter van der Veer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Picking up on Edward Said's claim that the historical experience of empire is common to both the colonizer and the colonized, Peter van der Veer takes the case of religion to examine the mutual impact of Britain's colonization of India on Indian and British culture. He shows that national culture in both India and Britain developed in relation to their shared colonial experience and that notions of religion and secularity were crucial in imagining the modern nation in both countries. In the process, van der Veer chronicles how these notions developed in the second half of the nineteenth century in relation to gender, race, language, spirituality, and science. Avoiding the pitfalls of both world systems theory and national historiography, this book problematizes oppositions between modern and traditional, secular and religious, progressive and reactionary. It shows that what often are assumed to be opposites are, in fact, profoundly entangled. In doing so, it upsets the convenient fiction that India is the land of eternal religion, existing outside of history, while Britain is the epitome of modern secularity and an agent of history. Van der Veer also accounts for the continuing role of religion in British culture and the strong part religion has played in the development of Indian civil society. This masterly work of scholarship brings into view the effects of the very close encounter between India and Britain--an intimate encounter that defined the character of both nations.

Download or read book Imperialism and juvenile literature written by Jeffrey Richards and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-01 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular culture is invariably a vehicle for the dominant ideas of its age. Never was this truer than in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when it reflected the nationalist and imperialist ideologies current throughout Europe. It both reflects popular attitudes, ideas and preconceptions and it generates support for selected views and opinions. This book examines the various media through which nationalist ideas were conveyed in late-Victorian and Edwardian times: in the theatre, "ethnic" shows, juvenile literature, education and the iconography of popular art. It seeks to examine in detail the articulation and diffusion of imperialism in the field of juvenile literature by stressing its pervasiveness across boundaries of class, nation and gender. It analyses the production, distribution and marketing of imperially-charged juvenile fiction, stressing the significance of the Victorians' discovery of adolescence, technological advance and educational reforms as the context of the great expansion of such literature. An overview of the phenomenon of Robinson Crusoe follows, tracing the process of its transformation into a classic text of imperialism and imperial masculinity for boys. The imperial commitment took to the air in the form of the heroic airmen of inter-war fiction. The book highlights that athleticism, imperialism and militarism become enmeshed at the public schools. It also explores the promotion of imperialism and imperialist role models in fiction for girls, particularly Girl Guide stories.

Download or read book Youth and Empire written by David M. Pomfret and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-16 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first study of its kind to provide such a broadly comparative and in-depth analysis of children and empire. Youth and Empire brings to light new research and new interpretations on two relatively neglected fields of study: the history of imperialism in East and South East Asia and, more pointedly, the influence of childhood—and children's voices—on modern empires. By utilizing a diverse range of unpublished source materials drawn from three different continents, David M. Pomfret examines the emergence of children and childhood as a central historical force in the global history of empire in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book is unusual in its scope, extending across the two empires of Britain and France and to points of intense impact in "tropical" places where indigenous, immigrant, and foreign cultures mixed: Hong Kong, Singapore, Saigon, and Hanoi. It thereby shows how childhood was crucial to definitions of race, and thus European authority, in these parts of the world. By examining the various contradictory and overlapping meanings of childhood in colonial Asia, Pomfret is able to provide new and often surprising readings of a set of problems that continue to trouble our contemporary world.

Download or read book Chivalry and the Medieval Past written by Katie Stevenson and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2016 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the ways in which the fluid concept of "chivalry" has been used and appropriated after the Middle Ages. One of the most difficult and complex ethical and cultural codes to define, chivalry has proved a flexible, ever-changing phenomenon, constantly adapted in the hands of medieval knights, Renaissance princes, early modern antiquarians, Enlightenment scholars, modern civic authorities, authors, historians and re-enactors. This book explores the rich variations in how the Middle Ages were conceptualised and historicised to illuminate the plurality of uses of the past. Using chivalry as a lens through which to examine concepts and uses of the medieval, it provides a critical assessment of the ways in which medieval chivalry became a shorthand to express contemporary ideals, powerfully demonstrating the ways in which history could be appropriated. The chapters combine attention to documentary evidence with what material culture can tell us, in particular using the built environment and the landscape as sources to understand how the medieval past was renegotiated. With contributions spanning diverse geographic regions and periods, it redraws current chronological boundaries by considering medievalism from the late Middle Ages to the present. Katie Stevenson is Senior Lecturer in Late Mediaeval History and Director of the Institute of Scottish Historical Research at the University of St Andrews; Barbara Gribling is a Junior Research Fellow in the Department of History at Durham University. Contributors: David W. Allan, Stefan Goebel, Barbara Gribling, Steven C. Hughes, Peter N. Lindfield, Antti Matikkala, Rosemary Mitchell, Paul Pickering, Katie Stevenson

Download or read book Empire in British Girls Literature and Culture written by M. Smith and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-07-08 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the gender and age of the girl may seem to remove her from any significant contribution to empire, this book provides both a new perspective on familiar girls' literature, and the first detailed examination of lesser-known fiction relating the emergence of fictional girl adventurers, castaways and 'ripping' schoolgirls to the British Empire.

Download or read book Risk in Children s Adventure Literature written by Elly McCausland and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-05-31 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Risk in Children’s Adventure Literature examines the way in which adults discuss the reading and entertainment habits of children, and with it the assumption that adventure is a timeless and stable constant whose meaning and value is self-evident. A closer enquiry into British and American adventure texts for children over the past 150 years reveals a host of complexities occluded by the term, and the ways in which adults invoke adventure as a means of attempting to get to grips with the nebulous figure of ‘the child’. Writing about adventure also necessitates writing about risk, and this book argues that adults have historically used adventure to conceptualise the relationship between children and risk: the risks children themselves pose to society; the risks that threaten their development; and how they can be trained to manage risk in socially normative and desirable ways. Tracing this tendency back to its development and consolidation in Victorian imperial romance, and forward through various adventure texts and media to the present day, this book probes and investigates the truisms and assumptions that underlie our generalisations about children’s love for adventure, and how they have evolved since the mid-nineteenth century.

Download or read book Tales of Imperial Russia written by Francis W. Wcislo and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2011-03-17 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History and biography meet in Tales of Imperial Russia, a study of the late-Romanov Russian Empire, told through the figure of Sergei Witte. Like Bismarck or Gorbachev, Witte was a European statesman serving an empire. He was the most important statesman of pre-revolutionary Russia. In the Georgia, Odessa, Kyiv, and St. Petersburg of the nineteenth century, he inhabited the worlds of the Victorian Age, as young boy, student, railway executive, lover of divorcees and Jews, monarchist, and technocrat. His political career saw him construct the Tran-Siberian Railway, propel Russia towards Far Eastern war with Japan, visit America in 1905 to negotiate the Treaty of Portsmouth concluding that war, and return home to confront revolutionary disorder with the State Duma, the first Russian parliament. The book is based on two memoir manuscripts that Witte wrote between 1906 and 1912, and includes his account of Nicholas II, the Empress Alexandra, and the machinations of a Russian imperial court that he believed were leading the country to revolution. Telling the story both of a life and of the last days of the Tsarist empire, Tales of Imperial Russia will delight and inform all those interested in biography, literature, and history, as well as readers interested in the history of modern Russia.

Download or read book Empire Islands written by Rebecca Weaver-Hightower and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a detailed unpacking of the castaway genre’s appeal in English literature, Empire Islands forwards our understanding of the sociopsychology of British Empire. Rebecca Weaver-Hightower argues convincingly that by helping generations of readers to make sense of—and perhaps feel better about—imperial aggression, the castaway story in effect enabled the expansion and maintenance of European empire. Empire Islands asks why so many colonial authors chose islands as the setting for their stories of imperial adventure and why so many postcolonial writers “write back” to those island castaway narratives. Drawing on insightful readings of works from Thomas More’s Utopia to Caribbean novels like George Lamming’s Water with Berries, from canonical works such as Robinson Crusoe and The Tempest to the lesser-known A Narrative of the Life and Astonishing Adventures of John Daniel by Ralph Morris, Weaver-Hightower examines themes of cannibalism, piracy, monstrosity, imperial aggression, and the concept of going native. Ending with analysis of contemporary film and the role of the United States in global neoimperialism, Weaver-Hightower exposes how island narratives continue not only to describe but to justify colonialism. Rebecca Weaver-Hightower is assistant professor of English and postcolonial studies at the University of North Dakota.

Download or read book The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe written by Daniel Goffman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-04-25 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text provides an introduction to the history and institutions of the Ottoman Empire and presents a claim for its inclusion in Europe, as opposed to being apart from it due to its many cultural differences.

Download or read book Our Frontier Is the World written by Mischa Honeck and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mischa Honeck's Our Frontier Is the World is a provocative account of how the Boy Scouts echoed and enabled American global expansion in the twentieth century.The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) has long been a standard bearer for national identity. The...

Download or read book Britishness Abroad written by and published by Academic Monographs. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a global phenomenon Britishness encompassed trade, conquest and settlement and the development of imperial cultures within the vast reaches of the British Empire. At its zenith peoples around the world joined in shared traditions and common loyalties that were strenuously maintained; even those who contested its claims found it difficult to escape its effects. With the eclipse of British power and influence, the importance of this legacy has attracted increasing attention from researchers seeking to escape the confines of national histories. Britishness Abroad explores the cultural, economic and political aspects of Britishness in Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, Canada and South Africa, as well as in the United States and within Britain itself. Leading scholars consider the movement of people, money, technology, identities, beliefs and attitudes around the British world and examine what happened to Britishness as the Empire declined. Contributors: Stephen Banfield, Kate Darian-Smith, Anne Dickson-Waiko, Patricia Grimshaw, David Goodman, Jonathan Hyslop, John MacKenzie, Gary Magee and Andrew Thompson, Adele Perry, Bill Schwarz, Stuart Ward

Download or read book Children and Childhood in Roman Italy written by Beryl Rawson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Concepts of childhood and the treatment of children are often used as a barometer of society's humanity, values, and priorities. Children and Childhood in Roman Italy argues that in Roman society children were, in principle and often in practice, welcome, valued and visible. There is noevidence directly from children themselves, but we can reconstruct attitudes to them, and their own experiences, from a wide variety of material - art and architecture, artefacts, funerary dedications, Roman law, literature, and public and private ritual. There are distinctively Roman aspects to thetreatment of children and to children's experiences. Education at many levels was important. The commemoration of children who died young has no parallel, in earlier or later societies, before the twentieth century. This study builds on the dynamic work on the Roman family that has been developingin recent decades. Its focus on the period between the first century BCE and the early third century CE provides a context for new work being done on early Christian societies, especially in Rome.

Download or read book Masculinities and Culture written by John Beynon and published by McGraw-Hill Education (UK). This book was released on 2001-11-16 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: * What is 'masculinity'? Is 'masculinities' a more appropriate term? * How are masculinities socially, culturally and historically shaped? * How are particular masculinities created, enacted and represented in specific settings? * How can masculinities best be researched and theorized? Masculinities and Culture explores how 'masculinities', or ways of 'being a man', are anchored in time and place; the products of socio-historical and cultural circumstances. It examines the emergence of a masculinity fit for Empire in the mid to late nineteenth century and, by way of contrast, the more recent media-driven, commercial New Man and New Lad masculinity. The author considers some of the media discourses shaping masculinities today, and the formation of specific masculinities in specific settings (such as prisons, hospitals and schools) which both define, and in turn are defined by, strongly held conceptions of acceptable masculine behaviour. He concludes by reviewing a range of ways in which masculinities might be researched, from fieldwork and auto/biographical and life history approaches through to semiotics and the use of both film and literary texts. This lively text provides a comprehensive introduction to contemporary debates concerning masculinities as gendered constructions, along with the means of researching and theorizing them.