DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire

Creating an Imperial Commons

Antoinette Burton editor Isabel Hofmeyr editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Duke University Press

Published:12th Dec '14

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

This paperback is available in another edition too:

Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire cover

Combining insights from imperial studies and transnational book history, this provocative collection opens new vistas on both fields through ten accessible essays, each devoted to a single book. Contributors revisit well-known works associated with the British empire, including Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Thomas Macaulay's History of England, Charles Pearson's National Life and Character, and Robert Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys. They explore anticolonial texts in which authors such as C. L. R. James and Mohandas K. Gandhi chipped away at the foundations of imperial authority, and they introduce books that may be less familiar to students of empire. Taken together, the essays reveal the dynamics of what the editors call an "imperial commons," a lively, empire-wide print culture. They show that neither empire nor book were stable, self-evident constructs. Each helped to legitimize the other.

Contributors. Tony Ballantyne, Elleke Boehmer, Catherine Hall, Isabel Hofmeyr, Aaron Kamugisha, Marilyn Lake, Charlotte Macdonald, Derek Peterson, Mrinalini Sinha, Tridip Suhrud, André du Toit

"Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons will prove invaluable to scholars working on imperial print cultures, attempting to think globally in Victorian or American studies, or otherwise seeking to unfield British Empire studies." -- Kellie D. Holzer * History: Reviews of New Books *
"Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire . . . sketches an important new nexus for the analysis of print cultures and empires, tracing the ways in which print was embedded in imperial contexts and could inflect those contexts." -- Robert J. Mayhew * Journal of Historical Geography *
"Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire works well because the books reviewed in it are diverse in origin, subject, and intention, and because the essays are all of a very high quality; the essays work together to inform and stimulate their readers’ further thinking about the cultural workings of colonization and decolonization. It is a book well worth reading as a whole. Together, it becomes much more than the sum of its many parts." -- Lisa Chilton * Canadian Journal of History *

ISBN: 9780822358275

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 404g

296 pages